imanage Core Facility Management System

Transcription

1 Smart software for smart people imanage Core Facility Management System Our product has been improved and changed, and so has its name. We settled on imanage Core since we will be focusing on developing more auxiliary applications that all revolve around our core in the future. And every year we use an internal code name for the new release. For example, in 2013 we used Platinum since it indicated value and it happened to be our 20th anniversary. This year, the code word is Wisdom, as in the all the world only wisdom is more rare and valuable than gold, platinum or anything material. Managing your facility and its operations wisely (with wisdom) is all you need to do and we hope that by embedding wisdom and intelligence into our software tools, we further that end, since your goal is our goal. 1

2 Let s start with the goals: At the beginning of the year, and each year, in fact, we start by talking to our customers, distributors, and consultants in the industry to determine our location in the industry where we want to go. That information is used in deciding what is needed most and is the basis for prioritizing what to design and develop for the coming year. This is the list we came up with: Interface: Make it easier to use/more intuitive Setup: Make if faster to get started, make it easier to modify, and change. Inspections: Make it flexible enough to inspect anything, with any type of checklist Power: Make it useable by any type of organization, including building service contractors and demanding organizations such as healthcare where cleanliness is literally a matter of life and death 2

3 Now, a bit about the power: While last on the list, its dear to our developers heart, so we will cover some of it first. The most striking and fundamental change is that our software can now handle multiple customers or accounts. Now, before all our friend in the in-house world start wondering, what does that have to do with me?, it actually has a lot to do with you too. The functionality we added is astounding and it works like this: you now may copy a customer (or your own self, if in-house) and you copy not only the entire space inventory, you also copy the hundreds of tasks associated with your room types and schedules. That is useful since: Obviously, if you are a contractor, you can copy an existing customer and have a running start. But, if anyone wants to do what-if analysis, say determine what your work assignments would look like with a short staff, you can do it in a copy and not effect your existing setup. Want to investigate the overall effect of changing equipment, supplies, task frequencies? Easy to do now, really easy. Along with this enhancement came new menu functions, Switch Customer, Customer Setup, and the Customer Dashboard. We thought of everything. For years, we have sold our software in a tiered pricing model by square foot capacity. Thus, what to do when customers start copying entire space inventories? The answer is simple, the application only considers the size of the current active customer. That means the maximum capacity limitation now means the maximum size of any given customer. In the pages that follow, we ll cover the full power of this new functionality, but back to the beginning first. 3

4 A more useable interface: Multi-select and Drag and Drop The holy grail of software development is software that does everything without the user having to think or learn anything. Unfortunately, the best we can do is automate tasks and carefully consider the terminology we use and the logic flow of the application. One of example of that is the use of drag and drop functionality, along with allowing multiselect in list boxes and the most important area of our software for implementation is in the process of creating work assignments. So, now our users simply select rooms in lists and drag them into the work assignment list. 4

5 A more useable interface: Less Buttons, less clicking And more information on the screen. Command buttons are useful when used sparingly, but can become daunting when there are too many of them (like children). Since we re all about power, we need to pack of a lot of commands on a single screen and in the past that meant command buttons. Now, instead of ladders of buttons, we have active lists of commands, and the lists are large enough to fully describe the function. If the list is long, you may have to scroll, but it allows denser functionality without clutter. For example, take our Schedule Dashboard, which old-time users will recognize as a rework of our Task Management screen. And, by the way, remember the copy customer function? The P2 tag at the end of the schedule name uniquely identifies this task schedule when the original customer was copied. Now, all you need to do is find the function you want and click on it. This cleans the screen and makes it easier for you to do your work. Also, for you healthcare customers out there, the task lists were developed according the latest AHE Practice Guidance. 5

6 Faster ways to get started: It s all about setup Setting up a large and detailed database as you need for detail work, work assignments, inspections, and the like requires input of a lot of data. The problem is that we see, on average about 3000 rooms per million square feet and if you have millions of square feet, well you have thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of rooms to load. We find in the field that many people are comfortable with spreadsheets and much of this data already resides in spreadsheets. So, since we work with a Microsoft Office Application anyway, why not leverage the power of Excel? We call it iexcel. The end result is literally astonishing. Our software now outputs a formatted spreadsheet, composed of your entire space inventory, neatly formatted on separate tabs (Accounts, sites, buildings, floors and rooms) along with a lot of other data such as employees, task frequency schedules, departments, and titles. But it gets better, you may use the spreadsheet to both add new data, or MODIFY data. We charge a bit for the module since it took hundreds of hours to create, The fee is nominal, $200 for the first year and, optionally, $150 each year subsequently. But, if you need it, it more than pays for itself, and we throw in an hour of personalized training to get you started. One other use of it is for facilities who haven t numbered all their rooms and wish to do that as a project. In the example below, the system analyzed the 3500 room spreadsheet and determined 21 rooms had been changed clicking the Run Update button (in red) will update the database to reflect these changes made in the spreadsheet. 6

7 Faster ways to get started: More on setup Our new Customer Setup Wizard can be used by anyone needing quick analysis of any type of facility. It is another first in the industry and works via a simple 5-step process to create the new customer, pick a facility-type, the size of the facility and the percent carpet. Once completed, a new space inventory is created, complete with it s own unique set of tasks. The templates are modifiable based on your experience regarding composition of types and percentages, and these can be further refined over time as you learn about them. But, perhaps the neatest feature is the ability to take an existing customer s setup and distill it down into a new template, complete with automatic calculation of composition. To help get started, we offer task sets based on everything from the latest AHE Practice Guidance for healthcare to the latest APPA Guidance for Higher Educational institutions. Our experts have perfected other sets of tasks, such as those used in K12, over the years and decades of experience are available to you. This functionality can be used by in-house departments and contract organizations to quickly determine labor and costs. If you care to set up your consumables or equipment, it can even determine consumables, equipment costs (purchase and wear items, fuel, etc.) and help you determine the ROI of mechanization. This feature was developed originally for the most demanding audience, consultants, but it can be used by anyone to get answers quickly. 7

8 Inspections and QA: Why use a hammer when you can use a nail gun? Fully half the development time spent this year was devoted to a new inspection system. That is because you spoke and we listened. The new system is so powerful and, for lack of a better word, cool, that we have a separate release announcement just devoted to it (ask and you shall receive), but briefly, the new system is so powerful and flexible it can be used to inspect anything, any time, in any way: Use any type of scoring system for any item Set up automatic inspection template picking by room type Develop and control any number of inspection templates covering everything from cleaning to maintenance and leverage your space inventory fully. Synchronize via USB or wirelessly and avoid costly data services if you wish, otherwise, if you need cellular connectivity, we can provide that too. 8

9 Back to the Power and New Features: Report Wizard Our new report wizard has been added to many areas of the software. It s a simple concept and you will love it. In two quick steps you can: Set report criteria: want just building X or just building X, and rooms larger than 200 SF of a certain type? And then want to see the total grouped by floor and all the details? Or just the summary? It s now trivially easy. And, better, you can save the selections to repeat the same report in the future. 9

10 Back to the Power and New Features: Insert Task Group Now, in addition to inserting a custom task, or an ISSA task, you can pick an existing task, or multiple tasks, and insert them as a group into other schedules, all with a few mouse clicks. In this, and many other areas, we offer so premium features the others either haven t thought of or don t have the heart to tackle. 10

11 Features and Capabilities Customer Setup Wizard: Generate as many accounts as you wish, all with their own space inventory and task sets and all up to the maximum square foot capacity purchased. Build them with a five step wizard and tailor the type composition, task frequencies, and just about everything else along the way. Handles work assignments on up to seven shifts, as well as project work. This allows you to have, for example, three 5-day normal work week shifts, three 2-day weekend shifts and a spare shift for, say, floor specialist work. Create unlimited sets of tasks, from a variety of sources provided internally (AHE, APPA, ISSA) or create your own. Handles any number of accounts, sites, buildings, floors and rooms up to 25 million SF in a single database. For more, simply create a new data file. Each database is only limited by the SF capacity purchased and that for the active account only. If you have one million SF capacity, that means you can have any number of customers, each with a million SF. Creates work assignments via simple drag and drop from one list to another. Keep records on any sort of object, by location, complete with history actions of any sort. Keep records for any number of employees, complete with a history of actions of any sort. View extensive graphical information on everything from relative time spent in rooms to relative time spent on individual tasks in the room. Capture inspection data via tablet with a comprehensive system that allows inspection of any item or room and have inspections done the way you want them to be done. See our brochure on ispec Mobile inspections. Perform advanced time, cost and FTE calculations considering everything from productivity to absenteeism, the work day length and work week length without having to know a single formula. Perform ROI calculations on proposed equipment purchases using your actual space inventory considering the tasks to be replaced and their frequencies, again simply with mouse clicks. And lots, lots more. Benefits: Improving quality and customer satisfaction Improving employee morale by scheduling their time fairly. Justifying your budget and proposed changes to it. Optimizing your operations by improving efficiency, analyzing existing processes and improvements Complying with record keeping requirements of various organizations: OSHA, Fire & Safety, etc. Complying with CIMS and/or LEEDS requirements Improving the status of your department or organization by raising the bar of professionalism What s more: Control your data via iexcel automation, an industry first. This allows rapid setup and changes to be made in familiar tool. Need some customization, no problem, give us a call. Like privacy? No data ever need go to the web, nice deal for hospitals, military installations, and for anyone who prefers not to send their information to websites that can be hacked. 11

12 And did you know? Our software can help you achieve ISSA s Cleaning Management Standards certification in many key ways, including: Standardized work loading and analysis Integrated Quality Assurance functions Organized employee record keeping and training modules Our software can help you achieve environmental goals by: Helping you analyze the labor and consumable costs or saving associated with green products by usage estimation. Establish standard operating procedures and training programs Assist in LEEDS Green building certification Over the past 20 years, we ve become known for leadership and innovation in the industry. First in the industry to offer APPA s Custodial Staffing Guidelines for Higher Education Task and Time data, including automatic appearance level switching and analysis (1993) First in the industry to offer integrated mobile inspection systems at no additional charge (2003) First in the industry to establish a price-by-the-square foot model (2006) First in the industry to provide streaming video help from within the software itself (2010) First in the industry to offer inspections via Windows Slates, including off-line operation and picture capture (2012) First in the industry to offer an integrated time-study module (2012) First in the industry to auto-scale screen display to application size, and handle a large number of shifts all controlled independently (2013) First in the industry to introduce Microsoft Office integration, including: Excel-based inventory control, Word-based help and Excel Graphing (2014) 12

13 Okay, how do I get it? Existing customers: Contact us or your distributor for a demo or an upgrade New customers: Contact us for a webinar and other information. Note that we offer a no-questions-asked, money back guarantee if, after 90 days, you decide the system isn t for you. That s right, we ll invest time to get you up and running since we have faith that once we do, you ll love what you see. Contact Information Informed Software 1518 Province Lake Road Effingham, NH Phone: Fax: support@informedcorp.com Core Website: Inspection Website: 13