Scotland’s National Health Service-Lanarkshire selects ARCHIBUS to consolidate work order response

by Brianna Crandall — August 25, 2014—The Scottish government’s recent mandate to reorganize its National Health Service (NHS) for greater operational/cost accountability and more efficient patient care motivated its NHS-Lanarkshire unit to initiate an integrated workplace management system (IWMS) technology upgrade that would cut work order response time and more by implementing ARCHIBUS, the real estate, infrastructure and facilities management solution used worldwide.

“We had incompatible systems across multiple services,” notes Maureen McGinn, NHS-Lanarkshire’s Technical Services Manager. “We also had a paper-based work order system as well as a poorly structured management approach to asset and labor task management. Finally, we had no consistent approach to reporting and measuring performance.”

To address those and other issues, ARCHIBUS is being implemented to centralize data on a single platform that supports the facilities department’s goals with a more rigorous, standardized approach to processes and metrics. The solution is eliminating a largely phone-based intake process for work orders and creating an online, self-service system for inputting work requests, and tracking the results to eliminate duplicate or lost work orders and improve communications and customer satisfaction.

So far, the Web-based system has resulted in a nearly 60 percent drop in phone-initiated work requests as users switched to online service requests. In addition, the ARCHIBUS work order system has enabled service performance measurement and benchmarking. The creation of a consistent reporting approach has also permitted the identification of best practices and areas for improvement.

The ARCHIBUS-based performance monitoring system has seen reactive maintenance response times drop from nearly 10 days to approximately two days, and had a similar drop in planned maintenance response times from roughly 35 days down to approximately five days. In both cases, the higher level of work request/work order automation enabled the department to more than double the number of jobs it could handle.

As NHS-Lanarkshire continues to refine and expand its ARCHIBUS implementation, the healthcare provider is looking forward to implementing a totally Web-based mobile system for facilities management operations as well as completing the move to ARCHIBUS Web Central for all its business processes.

For more information, see the ARCHIBUS Web site as well as the company’s FMLink ad.