The challenge
Royal Oaks, located in the age-restricted retirement community of Sun City, Arizona, continues to experience growth. When its current expansion is completed, the senior living community will be home to 900 residents. More than a place to live, Royal Oaks also includes restaurants, performing arts venues, fitness center, hair salons, billiard and ping pong centers and a library.
Without a centralized software solution to manage all the various facilities, maintenance and inventory, staffers were often scrambling to determine the most pressing needs and locate the right resources. For example, office staff frequently radioed drivers transporting residents to communicate about route changes, says Sarah Weddle, Warehouse Supervisor and CMMS Administrator.
In addition, maintenance personnel spent a lot of time trying to locate needed items, such as air filters. “We had about $250,000 worth of inventory scattered across our campus with no documentation,” Weddle says.
The solution
Several years ago, Royal Oaks began using TheWorxHub’s maintenance, housekeeping and IT modules on a limited basis. When Weddle joined the company as transportation manager in 2017, she looked at a number of different software programs to streamline transportation management before settling on TheWorxHub.
“I was sold on the product because it was so customized for senior living,” Weddle says. “Because the program was already working with a lot of facilities, I was able to learn more about how they’re using it.”
As Weddle learned more and more about the solution and its capabilities, she advocated for Royal Oaks to maximize its potential across community operations. Eventually, she was promoted to become CMMS administrator. With one person focused on driving implementation across the organization, Royal Oaks continues to experience positive results from TheWorxHub.
The results
After years of managing operations in a piecemeal fashion, embracing TheWorxHub has allowed Royal Oaks leaders to gain real-time visibility into all aspects of operations, providing documentation and data to inform better decision making.
“It has organized us,” Weddle says. For example, rather than scattered inventory in various locations with no tracking system, all inventory is now documented in TheWorxHub, making items easier to find and simplifying the process of ordering and budgeting for inventory.
“We have a much better handle on usage and costs of items,” Weddle says. “We can easily see trends, such as we’re now paying three times as much for this item than we were paying last year. Also, shrinkage has lessened. We’ve been able to get our inventory down to a manageable size and system that we never could have done before.”
To improve the transportation process, Royal Oaks outfitted each driver with an iPhone equipped with TheWorxHub app so they can keep track of schedules and routes on the go. “That has significantly reduced radio time and questions about transportation,” Weddle says. “I know it has given our riders a better experience.”
In the maintenance department, Weddle has worked to encourage technicians to use TheWorxHub’s timers, which allows managers to better understand where the techs are spending their time and work to improve productivity. While some technicians pushed back against using the timers, Weddle and maintenance managers have worked to explain that the timers are not intended to evaluate performance, but to document staff needs. For example, the documentation provided by work timers can help make the case for hiring additional workers when there’s too much maintenance work to be handled by the current crew.
Despite all the positive business results, “the best thing about TheWorxHub is the world-class customer service,” Weddle says. “When I’m training people on TheWorxHub, one of the first things I tell them is how great the customer service is. I know all my customer service people by name and they know me. Every time I call, I get a live person who can usually solve my problem. And if they don’t know the answer, they find out and get back to me quickly.”