Challenge

Chelsie Johnson and her Minneapolis-based property management team had two major challenges they sought to solve with OneSpot:

• Inefficient and error-prone management of service requests

• Non-standardized and time-consuming quarterly property inspections

As is the case for many commercial property managers, managing service requests was a highly manual process for Chelsie and her team. Service requests were sent to their vendors via email, along with any photos or other documentation. However, relying exclusively on email made it very difficult to follow up and track the status of the requests, especially when there were dozens of outstanding requests at any one time. Chelsie and team would search through their email outbox and inbox to determine: Did I actually send that service request out? Who did I send it to? Did they complete the work? Did I get an invoice? Did I close the request and accrue the expenses in our accounting system?

Another challenge Artis faced was how they executed quarterly inspections. The team relies on these inspections to identify new service requests that have to be budgeted for and completed.

In the past, assistant property managers Alyssa Coglianese and Sean Reilly conducted inspections in an entirely manual way. First, they would walk the property taking photos on their phones, and, upon returning to the office, they would organize the photos in a folder and send them to their vendors via email. Next, they made entries on a spreadsheet for each request sent, and tracked the status using hand-written notes on a printed version of the spreadsheet. Of course, they could only update the status once they tracked them down in their email or phone. This entire process proved to be cumbersome, time-consuming, and static.

The described process, on average, took as long as an hour per on-site property visit, and then another 30-60 min in the office, per property, typing up the form and filing the pictures. Across a portfolio of 25 properties, that resulted in an additional 50 hours of work per quarter - more than an entire work week! 

Solution

Using OneSpot software, Chelsie’s team conducts their quarterly inspections, creates new service requests, sends them to vendors, and monitors their completion in one seamless process from a single mobile app. It’s as simple as snap, send, done; right from their phones while walking the property.

In moving to One Spot the manual process of moving photos from phones to folders, transcribing handwritten notes from the field onto an Excel spreadsheet, searching through email and phone records for service requests, and interpreting handwritten notes to the Excel spreadsheet is eliminated.

Benefit

As Chelsie describes it, “What used to take around 30 minutes per property, can now be done in a matter of 30 seconds. That 98% reduction in time is quantifiably significant when looking across a portfolio of 20+ properties."

Chelsie continues, “It absolutely has streamlined our processes, for conducting inspections and managing service requests. Our team doesn’t have to go search our emails or check with three different people to see if there’s anything outstanding. It’s already made following up easier. To be able to go to one place and see who sent what request to which vendor and when is tremendously valuable. And, we can source this in real-time.”

The Artis team has also seen the value of replacing that disjointed process with OneSpot from a reporting and budgeting standpoint. “Our Assistant Manager, Sean, recently created all these points for the inspection at Plymouth Corporate Campus and immediately we had a five-page report that showed us each issue. He then followed-up and just checked it off in the app when they were done. Additionally, if some repairs needed to be budgeted instead of worked on immediately, Sean marked that within the app (via a “point”) for the 2019 budget, keep it open and monitor it in the app when it is scheduled for work.”

Download the entire Artis REIT case study here.