Case Study: Brightside Academy
Early Education and Childcare Provider Deploys Service Automation to Improve Facilities Management and Internal Collaboration
ServiceChannel
Highlights
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REDUCED WORKFLOW COMPLEXITY eliminated time constraints and increased visibility into workflows
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ELIMINATED SILOS BETWEEN CORPORATE DEPARTMENTS leading to better communications and collaboration with the facilities management team
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JUSTIFIED ADDITIONAL HIRING of facilities managers and technicians while reducing outside labor costs
Quantifiable Results
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REDUCED CASE RESOLUTION TIME
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WORK ORDER VOLUME INCREASE
“Maintaining excellence in our facilities management practice is a fundamental business requirement for Brightside Academy. But facilities management can be challenging in a highly distributed enterprise like ours with dozens of sites that can develop any number of issues requiring immediate service.”
Chelsea Prior
Senior Project and Technical Services Manager
Customer
An early education and child care provider with 60+ locations throughout the Northeast, Brightside Academy prides itself as a safe and supportive environment that promotes discovery and growth. An integral part of Brightside Academy’s success is combining its state-of-the-art facilities with a nationally recognized early-childhood curriculum that supports government-qualified educational programs such as Head Start and Universal Pre-K.
Challenges
Maintaining excellence of its facilities is a fundamental requirement for Brightside Academy, which must comply with numerous government regulatory standards in order to operate. Failing facilities inspections can lead to heavy fines or even site closures.
Even with such stringent facilities requirements in place, Brightside Academy only had one full-time facilities manager to manage all maintenance and repair issues across all its locations, relying on a network of contractors in each locale. This led to a number of challenges including:
- Manual contractor dispatching, which was inefficient and time-consuming
- Inability to monitor the progress of maintenance and repair projects in real-time
- Reactive facilities management approach, limited to fixing issues as they arose
- Lack of data and visibility into contractor performance, budgeting and other KPIs
“We were previously very siloed as a company – especially when it came to facilities management matters. Having a central service automation platform in place has enabled us now to be one team. It’s opened up the lines of communications greatly, which not only helps us resolve issues more quickly but has given us the justification to invest further into our program.”
Chelsea Prior
Senior Project and Technical Services Manager
Goal
Brightside Academy looked to upgrade its facilities management program to simplify its workflows and eliminate time constraints. The company turned to service automation technology with the goal of implementing capabilities such as:
- Empowering the Academy’s directors with an enhanced and self-service work order tracking system
- Improving facilities program performance management and budgeting through analytics and reporting, including objective contractor measurement
- Accelerating workflow process to limit the number of open and unresolved work orders
Solution
For its core requirements, Brightside Academy implemented:
- ServiceChannel Service Automation to streamline its key business and service processes. Using this platform, the facilities managers can now analyze work order data and generate reports instantaneously.
- ServiceChannel Custom Analytics to provide facilities managers the visibility and transparency into their operations across a number of data sets such as spending and budgeting.
Benefits
The ServiceChannel implementation has streamlined facilities management at Brightside Academy in terms of cost reductions and case resolution. However, the true value for the Academy is in how using service automation has broken down silos between corporate departments and improved communications and collaboration across the company. Specific benefits include:
- Improved compliance through real-time reporting that helped expedite repair and maintenance case resolution
- Corporate-wide usage of the platform including the CEO, all Academy Directors and all facilities managers
- Empowered the operations team with trend data and analytics to further simplify business processes and to make more informed decisions
Results
Deploying ServiceChannel has produced a number of impressive results for the Brightside Academy facilities management program. The management team now experiences faster response time and clearer visibility into its maintenance and repair projects. In turn, this has resulted in:
- Reduction in case resolution time by 93% since deployment, while work order volume increased 164%
- Overall reduction in outside labor costs through more efficient contractor sourcing and a more streamlined work order process
- Return-on-investment data to justify hiring new FM managers and technicians
