Customers
Bigfoot CMMS Goes To College and Builds Customer Satisfaction
Serving all of Indiana, Ivy Tech is the nation's largest community college system, and Bigfoot CMMS is the maintenance software of choice for its largest region.
After an extensive study of the Central Indiana Region's maintenance equipment, systems, and processes, a consultant recommended Bigfoot CMMS to replace the department's paper-based system. In the two years since then, the maintenance department has been going to school along with the 11,000+ students in the Indianapolis area. Staff members have been trained and modifications made to accommodate the school's specific needs. The department has also developed and implemented a brand new system by which its internal customers submit work requests.
The maintenance department has responsibility for all electrical, plumbing, remodeling and repairs on three campuses with facilities that range from an automotive sciences center to the central offices of the statewide system. Like most maintenance operations, Ivy Tech finds work orders and preventive maintenance comprise a major part of its workload. The maintenance department is using Bigfoot in more and more ways, such as actively building an equipment list, continually adding more predictive maintenance, and anticipating the use of collected data for repair/replace decisions.
From Maintenance Director "Doc" Nixon's perspective, he and his department have come a long way down the learning curve. "I've been able to keep learning more about Bigfoot on my own. Because it's so intuitive, it's been really easy." Doc trained his staff as well as set up the system to accommodate the school's particular needs. Some were modifications he could handle on his own, such as developing standard room set-up configurations to replace the pencil sketches that used to be stapled to work requests. Some modifications required assistance. "I made a lot of phone calls to tech support and got to know them pretty well. They always had the answer, or came up with one quickly. All in all, we're really running very smoothly now."
Bigfoot is a success from another perspective as well, that of the maintenance department's internal customers. Previously, work requests from anywhere in the region were submitted on paper, with no way for a customer to track a maintenance request once it was submitted. It was not possible for the requestor to know when the job would be done or, if a long time had passed, why the request was delayed or if it had been lost.
Bigfoot has changed all of that, and brought greater accountability to the process. All requests are electronically acknowledged, and an anticipated completion date provided. Customers can track the progress of the work order, so they know if parts had to be ordered or if a legitimate delay is in the works. According to internal polls, customers feel they are part of the process now, and their satisfaction with maintenance has gone up significantly.
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