“We had six delivery networks and each one had a different computerized maintenance management solution. That’s not the way to run a modern health care system.”
That was the challenge facing Nick Zauner, Executive Director, Facilities Engineering at Yale New Haven Health.
“We needed to find one CMMS solution for the entire system,” explained Nick. Which is how Yale New Haven came to choose FSI’s Custom Maintenance Software (CMS).
The need for something better
With more than 100 medical specialties and over 7,000 advanced practitioners, Yale New Haven is nationally ranked as one of the best hospital systems in the country by U.S. & World Report. Keeping its now seven different delivery networks running smoothly falls to Nick and his team.
“Each location has a facilities’ engineering department that has different trade shops,” explained Nick. “There’s an HVAC trade shop, a plumbing trade shop, one for general maintenance, another for electrical, often one for operating engineers for the heating, cooling and powerplants at each location.
“Before FSI, we were printing work orders out on a monthly basis. There’d be a stack of papers that a coordinator for the trades would have to shake out to the individual tradespeople. Then the trades would record the maintenance or repairs—again on paper—and hand them all back in at the end of the month. Then somebody else would have to go enter them back into the CMS.
“It was extremely labor-intensive and inefficient. It was hard for us to track how we were doing during the month. Were we on target to meet our goals for the month or not? It was basically impossible to do that.”
Enter CMS from FSI.
Usability and price were key
FSI offers Custom Maintenance Software (CMS) designed specifically for hospital maintenance teams by former hospital facility professionals. With it, Yale cms and more than 800 other organizations are able to monitor their facility assets in real-time, gaining visibility into inventory levels and asset histories.
Yale New Haven looked at 10 different systems and vendors. They had representatives from each of the delivery networks identify what was important to them, consolidated their lists, and developed their RFP.
“Usability was one of the most important criteria,” continued Nick. “Same with price point. We looked into client testimonials. The standout for us was that FSI’s customer base is healthcare. We found that to be a real benefit immediately.
“From the initial 10 systems, we narrowed it down to two. Both would work for us. What we liked about FSI, was that it was tailored around healthcare. That was a big draw. The other thing that we liked was that it was much easier to use. We did studies between the different platforms on how many clicks to be able to create a work order, how many clicks to be able to create a new asset, and so on.
“FSI was simple enough to use, yet still powerful enough to mine data, and have that data be useful in different ways to us. A lot of people using this are tradespeople. They may be in their 50s, and not that technologically savvy. It was really critical for us that our team would embrace this tool.”
Data you can believe in
Nick and his team now track all their work through FSI: testing, inspection, and maintenance activity for equipment and systems. What’s more, their customers are able to get in touch with them and put work orders in for corrective action items. All that work gets tracked as a work order in the FSI database.
“All total, about 220 different people—including managers, supervisors, tradespeople and me—use the FSI platform on a daily basis throughout the health system,” added Nick.
“All work orders come across on an iPad Mini to all of our tradespeople. No more paper work orders at all. Whether it’s a customer request or an ITM, our team gets it through their devices, and they complete it through their devices. It makes things very efficient for us.
“With our old CMS database, it wasn’t even possible to get data that we could believe in. Now we feel we have a solid data platform on which to base decisions. We’re now able to look at individual pieces of equipment and say, ‘How many times has this broken down? What has the cost been?’ We can rank equipment based on performance, and we prioritize replacements and capital investments.
Bottom line: a huge gain in efficiency
“Before FSI we were only able to account for about 30 percent of our work. Now we’re able to charge 80 percent to work orders, which is huge. And that 80 percent number is growing every day.”