ServusConnect Blog Digitizing Apartment Repair Records

Walking into a lot of different maintenance offices we saw this...A headache for many maintenance departments. However, in a world where we can do everything from banking to watching TV on our devices, we figured that changing the way these stacks of paper were managed would make everyone's life easier. Moving a paper-based work order system to the cloud makes your whole system more organized, efficient, and auditable.The first thing we wanted to get rid of was all of the paper that could easily be lost or destroyed. Service Technicians (techs) are busy dealing with the elements (water, damage, wind) and the downside of being so active is that the paper doesn't stand up to the abuse these guys give out.By instantly locking all these actions into the cloud, we found that it helps keep site managers and their techs much more integrated and plugged into working together. Additionally, moving digitally has the advantage of automation. The timestamps that are put on these service requests let the techs keep hyper-accurate records of what they do and allow for extraordinary depth on information (e.g., comments, photos, videos) to be recorded within a single work order.Talking to our techs, we have found that they love to use the app because it eliminates their worst nightmare, paperwork. Rather than wasting their time filing out 2 work orders (one to leave and one to return to the leasing office) and entering them into the system, record digitalization is giving the techs more time to do what they need to do - keeping residents happy. Having such a digital process eliminates many of the possibilities to introduce errors from the old system: reports of lost or damaged work orders, illegible handwriting, and typos when re-entering the data.Once all of these processes were digital, we found that everyone was happier without the hassles of paperwork. This isn't just about feelings though; this digitalization is saving a lot of time. Techs in the field are saving 5-7 minutes per work order just on filling out paper work. Courtesy of auto-populated fields, the technicians are now only filling out the pieces of the work order that they need to. Entering the back office, we see the service managers saving time by not having to re-enter all that data.The only thing worse than manually entering a work orders into the system is having to look through those same stacks of paper to find and report on your work orders. But often times looking through those work orders is the only way to get the information you need. That's why the instant digitization of these work orders allows to you save unprecedented depth and resilience in your data. Not only is this data richer, being in the cloud makes all of it way more secure and searchable from wherever you are, and also makes immediate feedback and searches possible.