There’s an old saying, “If you chase two rabbits, you won’t catch either one.”

It refers to our tendency to spread ourselves too thin, to chase too many priorities at once, and ultimately get nothing done – or worse, waste valuable time and energy on the wrong things.

Your engineers likely have a ton of things to do every day, but chances are there are 1 or 2 that are most important. These could be:

• A work order that’s open beyond the target completion date
• Service requests from at-risk tenants
• An overdue preventive maintenance task for a critical piece of equipment

If you’re allowing your engineers to rely on pencil and paper, spreadsheets, hallway conversations, forgotten information, and a lot of guesswork to get the job done, you’re exposing the organization to risk. The truth is, this is the old way. And it’s an inefficient, slow, and unreliable way of managing building operations.

Ultimately, the right answer to “what should I work on first today?” relies on having the right information in place, including:

Inspection data

Commercial real estate inspections are critical to remaining compliant. When is the next inspection due, and what data needs to be collected?

Bonus: If your team is empowered with a property management mobile app, they can collect data and complete inspections from the field.

Tenant historical information

How satisfied with service is this particular tenant? When was the last time an issue like this was reported? Track ongoing tenant sentiment to understand which tenants need to be prioritized to mitigate the risk of non-renewals.

Preventive maintenance

Preventive maintenance is essential to increasing the useful life of equipment and assets and improving the safety of tenants and staff, but it isn’t always easy to find time to complete PM tasks. By tracking PM deadlines and alerting engineers when service is due, your team will get the job done on time.

“Preventive Maintenance is Intelligent Maintenance,” according to a study by Jones Lang LaSalle. “An organization that implements and adheres to a structured PM Program will experience a 545% return over time. –  ‘Determining the Economic Value of Preventive Maintenance”

Service delivery performance

Only when you are tracking engineering tasks, work orders, service requests, completions, and tenant feedback, can you understand at a glance how your entire portfolio is performing. We call this Operations Performance Management, and it’s a proven way to optimize tenant service. By setting benchmark targets, you’ll know at a glance how your engineers are performing, identify problem areas, and better yet, prove your service delivery.

This information is critical for engineers to prioritize correctly.

An efficient engineer is a happy engineer.

It’s critical to make your engineers happy – after all, they’re the lifeblood of your properties and a tenant-facing representation of your brand. Put a system in place that tracks maintenance, tasks, and service delivery performance, so no critical work is repeated – or overlooked. Combine that with mobile, and you’ll empower your team to maximize their work from anywhere.

If you’re interested in learning more about putting mobile to work in your CRE properties, you may be interested in this resource:

5 real benefits of using mobile in CRE building operations.