Hood River County School District
A sprawling school district uses Limble’s advanced work order management system to complete its backlog and gain state-of-the-art efficiency.
Introduction
Hood River County School District is a rural public school district in Hood River County, Oregon, about 60 miles outside of Portland. Their school district consists of five elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school that serve over 3,700 students across 533 square miles. The distance between the schools and the district office — up to 30 minutes for some — brings unique challenges and opportunities for the maintenance team.
The Challenge
When Todd Rainwater took the role as the Director of Facilities and Operations for Hood River County School District in Hood River Oregon, he immediately knew he wanted to make some changes to the work order system. While they had one in place, it wasn’t helping them achieve the efficiency they needed.
“What we didn’t have was a good way of disseminating and tracking work, annual maintenance, or the preventative maintenance that needed to occur,” Rainwater said. They could never keep up. They would have hundreds of work orders in their queue and some projects were open for years and they struggled to get to them.
“When I took this position, that was something I wanted to get started on as soon as possible, knowing that it was going to take me years to get caught up.” With more than 250 outstanding work orders for his team of eight, some technicians had 50 or more in their individual queues.
They needed a system with features that could help them organize and address their backlog efficiently.
- Work order prioritization based on criteria they determined themselves
- High level visibility of each technician’s workload
- Mapping features that could ensure work orders were efficiently assigned based on location
- All this functionality in a mobile system that could be accessed from anywhere
“We’re more productive, we’re more efficient, and we’re providing better service across the district.”
Todd Rainwater, Director of Facilities and Operations
The Solution
Limble brought efficiency to their operation because it is more than a work order system — it is an entire maintenance management software. They organized work orders by priority and location. With Limble’s mobile app giving his team all the information they needed, Rainwater can now let technicians know about emergencies near them in real-time, no matter where they are in the district.
They were able to catch up on their backlog in months – something Rainwater expected to take years – and have introduced a more efficient process. Now, each team member never has more than five or six work orders at a time, all prioritized and organized by location for efficiency.
The Result
The maintenance team at Hood River County School District has increased their efficiency, job satisfaction, and money saved in their first year. Today, the team’s total number of outstanding work orders hovers around 30 at any given time. As Rainwater said, looking back over this last year, “It has increased our efficiency by leaps and bounds!”
“It was a really easy shift for my maintenance techs to make,” Rainwater says about implementing Limble. “Before, we weren’t very technologically advanced with our work order system — we kind of went from the Stone Age to the modern age!”