Using Issuetrak for Facilities Management

Over the last several weeks, we’ve talked about how a tracking software will help with facilities management in your small business, health care complex, educational institution, or property management company. Issuetrak can handle all of those needs and more.

Using email and spreadsheets may work for a time, but after a while, the challenges and frustration bring you to a point where you have to figure out another way. Tired of spinning in place, you need a better way to organize and prioritize your and your team’s workload.

With email and spreadsheets, you have to constantly make manual adjustments to any items that come up. Multiple team members can’t be doing updates at the same time, and pulling report data is time consuming and potentially fraught with errors. Trying to schedule preventative maintenance with a lot of assets means you have tons of tasks or appointments clogging up your calendars with no real method of making sure everything is completed within a certain timeframe.

Let Issuetrak help take away some of that burden.

Organization and Prioritization

With Issuetrak, anyone can create an issue, either by sending in an email, or by logging into the site. This means that instead of rifling through your emails and trying to determine priority, you have your list of issues waiting for you. With submission templates called Issue Templates (formerly called Quick Picks) that can be selected in the site or applied to incoming email, you can set up predetermined priorities or even kick off a workflow process needed to resolve the issue.

Being able to assign issues to anyone on your team, or even several at once, you can be sure you know who has what workload. Because issues can be associated to locations or assets, you know where your team members are and what equipment they’re working on. Any notes they add to the issue can go out as communications, so everyone stays in the loop.

You can also set up Workflows (formerly called Escalation Rules) to make sure that nothing gets missed or sits for too long without attention. Notifications on issues let you know when something’s been submitted, or if someone replies to work that your team has done. All communication back and forth is tracked right on the issue, giving you full visibility into what’s going on.

Reporting

Along with full visibility comes full reporting. Because everything is stored on the issues, the built in Report Writer allows you to create reports as detailed as you need, including getting things like the total number of issues in a time period or the average time issues are open. For a quick view into the issues, a search option lets you pull up issues by any value, plus you can save any frequent search. The Dashboard gives you a current view into all your open issues, letting you see at a glance how many issues you have by priority, location, or who’s assigned to it.

With saved searches or Report Writer reports, you have the ability to schedule them to be automatically delivered by email. This lets you make sure that those that needs to stay in-the-know do! You can send scheduled reports out to anyone that’s a user within the site, or to any other email address, so you can keep your superiors in the loop, even if they never log into the site.

Preventative Maintenance

One of the biggest advantages to Issuetrak is the ability to schedule out preventative maintenance on your assets. With the Scheduled Issues feature (formerly called Recurring Issues), you can define issues that automatically submit on a set schedule that you determine. You also have the ability to fill out any fields related to that asset. Your scheduling can be weekly, monthly quarterly, annually, or as flexible for complex intervals such as the 3rd Tuesday of every five months.

Each time the issue fires of, it has a unique issue number that separates it out from other issues. Since all the notes are specific to that issue and that maintenance cycle, you can report on exactly what was updated and when that happened.

You can also use the Task Manager (the workflow process component) to set up a series of steps or a checklist that walks you through everything you need to do for that issue. Tasks can be assigned to multiple people both inside and outside of your team, so anyone that needs to get involved in the process can.

All of the features in Issuetrak are designed for you to work smarter, not harder. By giving you a single location to view all your issues, the ability to easily run reports, and schedule all your preventative maintenance, your productivity can go up while your frustration goes down!

If you’re ready move beyond email and spreadsheets talk to one of our product experts today!