24/7 Software Blog

“Does anyone have any last-minute questions?” you say to your team.

Most of the group begin shaking their heads. You get the indication that everyone is on board with the action plan.

Tonight’s event starts in seven minutes.

You make your way to the operations center where your team is waiting for you.

Your Operations Manager, Terry, joins you in the Operations Center. You require all your supervisors to be in there at event start.

They usually get pulled out for other calls.

But, you like to do a quick meeting to kick off each event. This ensures everyone is on the same page.

“Hi, Susan,” you say to your director of customer experience, and you walk through the door. “Hey, Steve!” you shout to one of your operations coordinators.

After a few more greetings and a communications check with the rest of your team, the room gets quiet.

The event starts.

Issue and incident calls come in before most events start. But, the velocity of calls picks up once the customers congregate into the building.

A couple of hours of standard incident calls – wet spills, unruly spectators – go by without a hitch.

Everyone is on top of his or her game. Nothing seems to be slipping through the cracks.

But, in an instant, that all changes. Your team receives an incoming call that causes you to get involved quickly.

A customer reported to one of your employees that they identified two of your staff drinking beer while on duty.

You rush to meet your supervisor at the location.

Unfortunately, because the customer had to search for an employee to report the issue, the two employees are gone.

The customer is only able to identify that they were in uniforms. After checking the surveillance cameras, it is hard to distinguish who the employees are or to prove they were drinking.

How frustrated does this make you? How do you feel knowing that you have unruly, dishonest employees working for your operation?

You can change your process, so you do not have to be frustrated. You can be proactive. You can eliminate this burden and catch them in the act.

Use text communication to find the problem employees creating an unpleasant image of professionalism for your operation.

Keep reading; we are going to share how implementing one of these software solutions outperforms what you are doing now.

You dread waking up every morning at 6:30 AM at this point in your career.

It is not because you dislike your job. It’s because you feel overwhelmed.

Your property does not look good. Your boss is breathing down your neck because your operation is a mess.

Your CMMS is older than your eighteen-year-old kid. You despise using the application because it’s cumbersome.

You cannot keep track of your vendors. Your materials and labor are convoluted.

Engineers and technicians get their paper checklists of work to do each week.

However, nothing seems to get done on time.

For the last year, you have felt your maintenance operation is a lost cause.

However, this weekend gave you time to think.

You want change.

It is time for your current operation to be a distant memory.

You need change.

“I want to be remembered as the man who kicked the status quo in the rear end,” you whisper to yourself.

After rushing to get dressed, you head to your property.

You walk briskly through the parking lot, into your property, and burst through the office doors.

“Jim, it’s time to change!” you shout to your lead technician.

He gives you a blank stare while he waits for you to elaborate.

“We need to find a solution that helps keep everyone on track with their projects.

Will you help me find a solution to this problem?”

He nods.

After seven minutes of scouring the internet, you land on this article, and your property operation changes forever.

Don’t believe us? Keep reading.

“An engineer in California has an invention that she hopes will someday help people with damaged lungs breathe easier,” writes Joe Palca in their recent NPR article entitled “Experimental Lung Treatment Could Make Breathing Easier.”

According to Palca, “Stanford University's Annelise Baron has developed a synthetic version of something called lung surfactant. Lung surfactant coats the tiny air sacs in the lung. Without it, every breath would be a struggle, like blowing up millions of little balloons. With surfactant, breathing is as easy as blowing soap bubbles.”

“Scientists inferred the existence of lung surfactant in the 1950s, and then Dr. Mary Ellen Avery showed that premature infants were unable to make surfactant, explaining the often fatal respiratory distress syndrome they suffered from,” Palca explains.

The NPR article continues that “Stanford University pulmonologist Angela Rogers says a surfactant harvested from animal lungs has been used successfully to treat these preemies.”

"It's absolutely a lifesaver. Hundreds of thousands of people are alive in our country today because of the widespread use of surfactant," says Rogers in Palca’s piece.

“Rogers says that success made doctors wonder if surfactant use could be expanded,” shares Palca.

Rogers continues in the article that "there was a lot of interest in my field to try to surfactant in adults that have a problem with their lungs called acute respiratory distress syndrome."

The NPR article explains that “initial results using surfactant in adults weren't very promising, and lung surfactant was just too expensive to try using it for very long in adult lungs.”

“That's where Barron's work comes in. For more than 20 years, she's been trying to make a cheaper, synthetic surfactant, and now she thinks she's succeeded,” reveals Palca.

Medical advancements like this are exciting progressions for our future that we can all be grateful for today.

Agree?

Steps towards better health are critical to our longevity.

That made us think.

What’s critical for the longevity of your property’s operation? Like Barron inventing a substance to ‘make breathing easier,’ what would ‘make your life easier?’

While we know your role doesn’t focus on synthetic surfactant, there’s an interesting lesson here:

• An operational methodology world-class operations rely on every day to achieve maximum performance could be used to make your life easier

Are you aware of this methodology? It’s Proactive Operations!

And, we’re confident it will make your life easier.

You walk in your office.

It’s 7:30 AM, and you’re feeling good today.

Yesterday was successful.

Everything went as planned – nothing out of the ordinary.

All is good across your operations, right?

But, that’s not true, and you’ll never know that because you’re current “tool” prevents you from understanding this.

You’re not aware of the three people transported to the hospital for food allergies after eating at the same place.

You’re also not aware of the many complaints regarding one of your staff members.

Why?

Either you’re not using your operations management software to the fullest – or using one at all.

That’s a severe problem.

We need to fix it today.

But, there’s a chance we might get pushback from you.

Is “we’re not very good with technology,” going to be your response?

If not, that’s good!

But, keep reading anyway because we’ll share how to avoid facing this issue with your team in the future.

If you do believe you’re “not very good at technology,” we’re going to share why that must not prevent you from using a real-time communications software solution.

Ready?

“Today was the day astronomers said goodbye to the old Milky Way they had known and loved, and said hello to a new view of our home galaxy,” writes Nell Greenfieldboyce in their recent NPR article entitled “You Are Here: Scientists Unveil Precise Map Of More Than A Billion Stars.”

“That's because a European Space Agency mission called Gaia just released a long-awaited treasure trove of data: precise measurements of 1.7 billion stars,” explains Greenfieldboyce.

According to the article, “It's unprecedented for scientists to know the exact brightness, distances, motions and colors of more than a billion stars. It will yield the best three-dimensional map of our galaxy ever.”

Having such a “treasure trove” of data to pinpoint the location of stars – that’s what we call situational awareness!

"This is a very big deal. I've been working on trying to understand the Milky Way and the formation of the Milky Way for a large fraction of my scientific career, and the amount of information this is revealing in some sense is thousands or even hundreds of thousands of times larger than any amount of information we've had previously," said David Hogg, an astrophysicist at New York University and the Flatiron Institute, in Greenfieldboyce’s NPR piece.

"We're really talking about an immense change to our knowledge about the Milky Way," Hogg continues in the article.

“The Gaia spacecraft launched in 2013 and is orbiting our sun, about a million miles away from Earth. Although it's surveyed a huge number of stars, Gaia is charting only about 1 percent of what's out there. The Milky Way contains around 100 billion stars,” Greenfieldboyce shares.

That’s a few more stars than incidents you have on your property.

But, it brings up an important topic we’d like to discuss today.

One that we believe you’ll get immediate value from by leveraging the solution we share in this article.

‘Situational awareness’ is a critical part of your job.

Agree?

But, it can often slip through the cracks because of all the other responsibilities your team is charged with managing.

New ideas, process, or technology for improving your awareness of incidents on your property might get overlooked.

Not today.

Keep reading; we’re going to share a solution proactive operations are using to get the “revealing” information needed to manage your property’s incidents in real time.

Safety of your customers is critical.

They become your responsibility every time they walk onto your property.

Agree?

That’s why it’s important to understand how effective incident management helps your initiatives.

Defined, well-organized processes lead to proactive execution.

We can’t put a price on the importance of this.

Can you?

Understanding how vital your management is to your team’s performance will help you deliver an exceptional experience for customers every day.

But, it’s not an easy undertaking.

It takes time, effort, and possibly making mistakes along the way to get to a place where you’re confident in what your operation can accomplish.

But, you need to do it – your customers rely on your ability to keep them safe.

We understand the importance of this.

That’s why we want to help.

We’re going to discuss the ten things you need to know about incident management.

But, the concepts below are also integrated into how you should augment your operations using a software solution.

It’s different than most articles on a topic like this – but we think it’ll be powerful and extremely valuable to you and your team.

How does that sound?

Let’s not waste any more time!