There’s not a building services contractor anywhere who’s not looking for improved management procedures that increase the productivity and efficiency of her building services operation.

But where do those production improvements come from, and how do you measure them. Providing end users with the right tools and techniques is the first step, but how do managers improve their productivity?

They’re responsible for making sure that jobs are bid correctly and adequately staffed, work orders are accurate, workers are safe and efficient, inventory is up-to-date, equipment is maintained, and the finished job is what the customer wants. They can’t be everywhere, so like their end users, they need to develop skills and acquire tools that make it possible to run their operations.

Scott Smith is a 25-year building services contractor and owner of Rimrock Technologies, a janitorial software developer in Billings, Montana. He says, “BSCs are all about productivity in the field. They have to be able to tell their employees what needs to be done and how long it should take.”

To help determine this, he’s developed a software system specifically for the janitorial and building services industry. He calls it Executive ToolKit, a suite of seven modular applications designed to simplify management procedures while increasing the productivity and efficiency of building services operations.

Seven modules utilize a database of five standard components: customers, buildings, tenants, employees and suppliers. Each of these components also offers information related to them.

For example, the customer screen shows all the buildings listed for each customer, the buildings screen shows all the tenants in that building, contract information, and all the products and equipment issued for each building. This integration completely eliminates the hassles typically involved with managing and organizing accounts.

Smith’s seven modules include tools for bidding and estimating, conducting inspections, tracking inventory, keeping costs down, maintaining a safe workplace, keeping jobs scheduled properly, and writing accurate work orders.

For bidding and estimating, look for a step-by-step guide through the bidding and estimating process. The software should allow for the creation and printing of easy to- use worksheets for bid walk-throughs. With these worksheets, BSCs can prepare eye-catching cover letters, proposals and appendices for the final bid presentation.

To accommodate individual operation, bids can be generated based on price per square foot, hourly, cost-plus or by the piece. Overhead and other factors are used in the bidding process as well, and may be itemized or entered using a flat dollar amount or percentage.

Look for full integration with other modules so you won’t have to re-enter customers and buildings. If you also have an inspection module, you should be able to easily create an Inspection Template from your appendix with the click of a button.

Labor, overhead, taxes, supplies, equipment and profit are calculated for every segment of your bid. Each of these expense items can be customized for you to include as much detail as you need or simply use a flat percentage or dollar amount for each category.

There are a number of things to remember (and forget) while walking through a potential customer’s facility, so information gathered using included survey forms helps bidders remember to get all the information they need to make an informed proposal.

Inspections

In any business, one of the most overwhelming challenges is proactive management of quality control. When the job is done right, it goes unnoticed because that is what is expected. However, without a continuous monitoring process, quality will gradually decrease over time and could potentially become the new status-quo.

The only way for contactors to measure quality is to go into the field and check it. Successful organizations systematically use these inspections to improve their processes, which in turn increases the quality of the work being done. An inspection module is a good tool to manage a quality control program.

Inventory

Ever wonder how much money is tied up in general supplies and equipment? An inventory module can tell you. With a click of a button, contractors can find out exactly what they’ve issued and when — for all their customers or just one. This provides efficient inventory management that eliminates hours of frustrating effort.

A flexible and intuitive report utility helps generate meaningful usage and valuation reports to let you know what you currently have on hand and what it is worth. For example, you can print a report that shows all the billable supplies you issued for a specific date range. In addition, you can narrow the search for a specific customer.

 Job Costs

We all know that labor is the major cost of building services, so Smith set out to develop a tool that provides a resource to enter employee time and rate cards. Since an employee can use any amount of job numbers and/or pay types for any given day, time tracking can become very complex. With different features, unique job and distribution reports can provide up-to-the-minute hours and costs for jobs and employees. In addition, they should tracks employees in overtime, anniversaries, benefit hours, evaluations, and costs by department and even have a billing report that runs on the last pay period of the month.

When a pay period is run, employees in overtime that use more than one pay type will have their overtime averaged. Time cards can be optionally exported to other programs such as QuickBooks, Microsoft Excel, Comma Delimited Text or HTML formats.

Safety

“Too often people don’t think about safety before it’s too late,” says Smith. To keep workers’ comp and labor turnover costs at a minimum, he says that a safety module is a tool to create and implement a safety and health program that includes hazard communications on material safety data sheets and present dangers such as blood borne pathogens, chemical handling and hazard recognition. Site-specific training is available, and the software can help guide you through the different stages of setting up a safety program.

Scheduling

Building services contractors have to workload, schedule and report tasks for any number of companies or clients. A schedule module should allow managers to schedule an employee, position, team, etc. and then print the corresponding report into a variety of styles. Some programs offer miniature reports that can be laminated and given to an employee.

Work Orders

In the cleaning business, proactive management of customer satisfaction is a big challenge. When the job is done right, nobody seems to notice. But when a mistake occurs, the customer is quick to bring the error to your attention. Once a complaint is made known to you, it is imperative that every effort be made to resolve the issue to their satisfaction.

But the effort does not stop there. Successful organizations systematically use such customer feedback to improve their process, which in turn increases work quality. The only way to measure customer feedback and learn from this valuable source of information is to quantify data about your process.

That’s why a work order and complaint dispatch system that prints work orders and reports for your cleaning and management staff is valuable. It also can provide a powerful, comprehensive search utility to help your organization not only communicate work orders and complaints to your staff, but also to interpret and measure the data that is received quickly.

When choosing a software program, the application it will be used in is of utmost importance. Users have to know what they need. The software provider, like a building service contractor, has to make sure the service meets the client’s need.