As the pandemic continues to test businesses, both around the world and across all market sectors, the construction industry is identifying new solutions to get the most out of existing resources. With an increased federal focus on infrastructure and the 2020 project backlog, it’s more critical than ever to maximize asset availability to complete jobs on time and on budget.
ManagerPlus by iOFFICE is a collaborative, cloud-based EAM software that empowers asset-heavy businesses to capitalize on their data to improve O&M activities. iOFFICE, a leading provider of workplace and asset management SaaS solutions, credits its success in the enterprise asset management space to continual improvements based on market insights and customer feedback.
“Serving as the voice of our customer is the most important thing that we do as a product team. We talk to members of our Customer Advisory Board on a regular basis, especially those in the construction industry. That sort of regular and ongoing back-and-forth customer collaboration absolutely leads to better innovation on our part and has helped us to become the trusted and respected EAM that we are today,” says Chad Smith, Vice President of Product Strategy for iOFFICE, including its asset maintenance software platforms, ManagerPlus and Hippo CMMS.
Smith began his career as an architect and gained extensive knowledge of the construction landscape, including health care and corporate real estate, over more than two decades in software product strategy. His professional experience and product leadership play an integral role in adding tremendous value to iOFFICE’s construction partners. By leveraging experience in EAM for construction-related fields, iOFFICE builds market-leading capabilities into ManagerPlus with a continued focus on providing intelligent insights to help companies optimize their heavy equipment.
“The construction industry is competitive and constantly evolving. Our technology helps clients with those challenges. We’re constantly looking at how we can make our solutions quicker and easier to deploy, easier to use, and more effective to help our construction clients with their business challenges,” elaborates Smith.
DeFoe Corp., a ManagerPlus customer, built their company reputation around high-quality work as a highway and bridge contractor in the New York Metro Tri-State area. To grow their business, DeFoe needed to increase asset availability, improve efficiency, and reduce potential delays. By deploying ManagerPlus, DeFoe reduced preventable downtime by 50 percent. The cloud-based software ensured that no matter where the job site was, DeFoe’s techs could perform heavy machinery maintenance on time. They were able to consolidate inspections, certifications, and scheduling into one easy-to-use platform. ManagerPlus transformed the approach to DeFoe’s business operations and significantly reduced costs impacting the organization. With more assets online, DeFoe saw a real return on their investment.
Creating a connected workforce
The future of the construction industry is connected. The past year emphasized the need for visibility, collaboration, and transparency in terms of cost and critical asset performance.
“What constitutes a workplace and where a workplace is located has been transforming for a long time, but with the pandemic the workplace has been revolutionized. It’s not just in a trailer on a construction site. It’s in a pickup truck. It’s in the seat of a crane. And it’s even at home now. It’s everywhere. So, we design our solutions to support customers not just in those unique locations and workplace conditions, but also in their need for 24/7 connectivity,” says Smith.
ManagerPlus offers business intelligence capabilities, including pre-built reports to give users a quick view into maintenance operations. With customizable dashboards, customers can summarize performance against KPIs to show relevant asset, inspection, and vendor-related data.
Through robust preventive maintenance features, customers can prevent unnecessary downtime by addressing asset upkeep before breakdowns. End users can generate schedules for preventive maintenance and assign them to both internal and third-party teams alongside standard maintenance work orders.
“Our entire world, including the construction industry, is now inundated with massive amounts of data from an interconnected world,” says Smith. “It’s one of our most import jobs as a product team to design solutions that make sense of all this data quickly, efficiently, and — as we get further into a world of artificial intelligence and machine learning — automatically.”
Tapping into mobile solutions
From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, iOFFICE strengthened the mobile solutions of ManagerPlus by offering new ways to access the software. ManagerPlus offers two separate mobile apps designed for specific roles within the users’ organization. The Operator Companion app allows users operating assets and running inspections to see historic work on the equipment they operate. Users can scan a QR code on the asset from their connected device to immediately display relevant data, and can access tasks remotely.
The ManagerPlus team developed the Work Companion app for technicians performing work orders. Scanning an asset’s QR or barcode populates relevant work orders, past inspection results, logs, and information on personnel who worked on the asset most recently.
“Job site safety is always a top concern. In addition to the flexibility that mobile solutions provide, they also help with ensuring worker safety and ongoing maintenance of construction equipment. Our clients use our mobile solutions for inspections to ensure that sites are in fact safe and that equipment is properly maintained,” says Smith.
Tracking data in a centralized location is an important factor in maintaining compliance requirements and supporting audit trails. Connecting the inspection process with asset operators and technicians through ManagerPlus helps close the feedback loop on every asset in real time. Apps make it easy for teams to streamline workflows and collaborate more efficiently, all from their mobile devices.
Cross-team collaboration
ManagerPlus offers additional features, including equipment log tracking, planning and scheduling, inventory control and purchasing, and vendor management. The Vendor Portal allows organizations to easily integrate third-party stakeholders into the system to assign work orders just as they would to their own team. Vendors receive a temporary link granting them access to only the work orders assigned to them to keep data safe while seamlessly tracking their work.
iOFFICE continually drives innovation, such as by developing integrations with other business solutions. “We plan to forge into the future by building real value for users and ensuring our offerings go beyond ‘good enough,” says Smith.
