Our Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor, Jodie Mowrey, sat down for an inter­view with Christo­pher Luci­er, Nation­al Sales Direc­tor, to dis­cuss Smart Facil­i­ty Software’s client ser­vices.

Cleanable Site Inventory & Database Building

Jodie: Tell us about our imple­men­ta­tion and EVS con­sult­ing ser­vices and that go along with our Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices soft­ware.

Chris: Typ­i­cal­ly, when some­body con­tracts with us, we’ll come on site. First, we walk the hos­pi­tal and cre­ate a room and clean­able space inven­to­ry based on the spe­cif­ic cam­pus details of build­ings, floors, sub­sec­tions, and rooms. The inven­to­ry of rooms con­sists of mea­sure­ments of square footage, iden­ti­fy­ing floor type, and the spe­cif­ic use of that room, which would be the room type.

Whether it’s a nurs­es’ sta­tion, a patient room, a med room, or cor­ri­dors, all of those spaces cre­ate a data­base of the met­rics for clean­ing that spe­cif­ic cam­pus. So, unlike a bench­mark, we’re look­ing at your unique cam­pus infor­ma­tion.

Staffing Analysis

Jodie: How do you use that infor­ma­tion?

Chris: The next piece would be to iden­ti­fy the staffing needs for clean­ing that facil­i­ty. We do that in two ways: we do it with the clean­ing times asso­ci­at­ed with the room inven­to­ry that we’ve built, and we account for time need­ed for oth­er EVS duties: such as pulling trash out of the build­ing or bio waste trans­porta­tion, could be chang­ing cur­tains and those sorts of things. It also includes man­age­ment time, non-pro­duc­tive time (likes breaks and vaca­tions), and lock-in posi­tions in the ER, OR and Labor and Deliv­ery.

So, we com­pile these two sets of infor­ma­tion in the data­base and we then run a report that will tell us what the staffing needs are for the depart­ment.

We also look at things like per­for­mance or appear­ance lev­el. When we build the staffing analy­sis, our first run would be a stan­dard lev­el of clean­ing, which is kind of that mid­dle of the road. It’s not a pre­mi­um ser­vice and it’s not an econ­o­my ser­vice. From that, we look at things like bud­get and bal­ance that with the ser­vice lev­el the hos­pi­tal is try­ing to cre­ate and run a to-bud­get analy­sis. This means, we con­sid­er: what changes do we need to make to the lev­els of ser­vices and staff allo­ca­tion with­in the data­base in order to achieve the bud­get for that depart­ment? Some­times that bud­get is above econ­o­my or clos­er to stan­dard, and some­times it’s below. We’ll make adjust­ments to things such as the fre­quen­cy with which we clean offices or the fre­quen­cy with which we clean cor­ri­dors. Or, maybe the time it takes for us to clean patient rooms is adjust­ed. So, all of those fac­tors come into play when we try to meet the bud­get.

“We’re trying to not overburden somebody with too large of an area or too high a frequency of service level.” — Christopher Lucier

Workflow Setup

Jodie: How do work­flows fit in?

Chris: Once we’ve got that infor­ma­tion (the room inven­to­ry and staffing analy­sis), and we agree on what our tar­get is, the next piece is build­ing work­flows in the soft­ware. We build work­flows aligned for both dai­ly clean­ing and peri­od­ic (project) work, and bud­get goals. We build bal­anced assign­ments and know each employ­ee is assigned lev­el of work that they are capa­ble of achiev­ing. We’re try­ing to not over­bur­den some­body with too large of an area or too high a fre­quen­cy of ser­vice lev­el. The clean times asso­ci­at­ed with tasks and rooms allow us to pre­vent that from hap­pen­ing.

The end result is a clear set of work­flows you can eas­i­ly assign to staff and build sched­ules.

Service Optimizer Implementation and Adoption

Jodie: Let’s talk about Ser­vice Opti­miz­er imple­men­ta­tion.

Chris: Ser­vice Opti­miz­er is a soft­ware takes the work­flows typ­i­cal­ly dis­trib­uted to staff on paper and sends them elec­tron­i­cal­ly to their mobile devices instead. Ser­vice Opti­miz­er is a com­plete com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­form for the Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices depart­ment. It allows for two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion of every­thing includ­ing dai­ly work­flows, project work, mes­sag­ing back and forth, and adding tasks. So, our imple­men­ta­tion of Ser­vice Opti­miz­er brings those train­ing com­po­nents to the fore­front.

We pro­vide a one-day ses­sion where we would work with the super­vi­so­ry team and show them what Ser­vice Opti­miz­er does and adjust the pro­gram set­tings to meet their needs. And then we’ll spend about a week on site work­ing with the front­line staff mem­bers on how to use the soft­ware and ensure adop­tion. We walk the floors and help techs under­stand how to log rooms as clean, how to log tasks com­plet­ed, and how to see when they receive tasks, and how to mon­i­tor those dur­ing the day.

Our goal is not nec­es­sar­i­ly to car­ry some­body from start to fin­ish, but basi­cal­ly to give them the tools to be able to man­age it them­selves once we’ve left the build­ing.

Software Training

Jodie: What does soft­ware train­ing con­sist of?

Chris: Our soft­ware train­ing is typ­i­cal­ly a two-day pro­gram. We run through all of the dif­fer­ent mod­ules with­in ES Opti­miz­er and teach them about nav­i­gat­ing through the soft­ware, under­stand­ing how the data­base was built, how we added build­ings and floors and sub­sec­tions, and how we added rooms. We also show them how to make changes to the room data so they can man­age it in the future.

And then the next piece we dive into is how to build work­flows and manip­u­late them. The work­flows are already built out by us, but as things change such as staffing, or the vol­ume of patients in the build­ing, they will be able to make changes to work­flows as they need to. We also train them on how to cre­ate short staff assign­ments for when the need aris­es.

“We have a really strong tech support department providing help for everything from a password reset to pulling specific reports to providing online training.” — Christopher Lucier

As part of that on site train­ing, we’ll go from the per­son­nel mod­ule into the QA piece, help­ing them under­stand how to do inspec­tions and how to pull reports from that infor­ma­tion. And then we also show them the cus­tomiz­able train­ing mod­ule and how to upload their own train­ing into it.

We’ll briefly touch on the pref­er­ences tab, which is where all the main set­tings are with­in the pro­gram. Because ES Opti­miz­er is such a cus­tomiz­able tool, I want them to under­stand how to do it.

Tech Support

Jodie: Let’s talk about the tech sup­port. Once the soft­ware is set up and imple­men­ta­tion is done, Smart Facil­i­ty con­sul­tants are gone from the facil­i­ty. But, talk about what ongo­ing sup­port Smart Facil­i­ty pro­vides.

Chris: We have a real­ly strong tech sup­port depart­ment pro­vid­ing help for every­thing from a pass­word reset to pulling spe­cif­ic reports to pro­vid­ing online train­ing.

“That really came to light at the beginning of COVID when we started to have hospitals that needed to add specific or custom procedure codes for handling COVID issues or COVID cleaning requirements.” — Christopher Lucier

Dan Jones, head of our Tech Sup­port depart­ment, will usu­al­ly answer the phone or return a call soon there­after. An email is usu­al­ly a great way to log a request. I push peo­ple towards email because, once some­body sends an email to our tech sup­port line, it hits no less than 10 peo­ple with­in our com­pa­ny. From the pres­i­dent, to all of our con­sul­tants, to our tech sup­port line. So, every­body’s going to see that note.

I’ve seen our CTO/CIO Mark Clabaugh reset a pass­word for some­body at one o’clock in the morn­ing, which is not, I think, typ­i­cal in a com­pa­ny our size.

Consultant Support

Jodie: My under­stand­ing is that you and all of our con­sul­tants con­tin­ue work­ing close­ly with a lot of your clients on EVS oper­a­tions ques­tions and chal­lenges as long as they have the soft­ware.

Chris: Yes, we have rela­tion­ships with our cus­tomers where we under­stand not just their build­ings, but their needs and their per­son­al­i­ties. We real­ly want peo­ple to look to us, not just from the tech sup­port side, but, as a part­ner.

Our con­sul­tants are Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices pro­fes­sion­als who have indus­try expe­ri­ence, and can relate what they’ve seen across the indus­try. Once some­body in our com­pa­ny has built the rela­tion­ship, the end user is often very com­fort­able with call­ing them up and say­ing, “Hey, can you tell me, how would you han­dle this staffing sit­u­a­tion or over­come this chal­lenge?”

That real­ly came to light at the begin­ning of COVID when we start­ed to have hos­pi­tals that need­ed to add spe­cif­ic or cus­tom pro­ce­dure codes for han­dling COVID issues or COVID clean­ing require­ments. And we have one client in par­tic­u­lar that we cre­at­ed a new clean­ing code for. We built the new code into a staffing analy­sis to under­stand the impact of adding those new clean­ing process­es to their staffing lev­el. And that’s just a tip of the ice­berg as to what our con­sult­ing team does to sup­port both our front­line cus­tomers and our tech sup­port line.

“Our EVS directors are typically in back-to-back meetings and don’t have time for a single call. So, when they take their time to call us, we know they see the value in using us as part of a support system for their challenges.” — Christopher Lucier

Jodie: So would you say the team has strong rela­tion­ships with their clients?

Chris: I would. The oth­er day I was actu­al­ly on a job with John­son Bridges, who is one of our data spe­cial­ists. A cus­tomer called him up. And we were in the mid­dle of a con­ver­sa­tion. He’s like, “Hold on. I need to take this, it’s a cus­tomer I worked with last month.” And it was inter­est­ing to lis­ten in because the con­ver­sa­tion was, “Hey, I’m just get­ting back to you. I had need­ed some­thing, but I resolved it myself, but I just want­ed to touch base with you.” The con­ver­sa­tion was more per­son­al than it was busi­ness.

It was ini­ti­at­ed over a busi­ness need, but then it became, how are you, how are things in the area? What’s going on with your fam­i­ly?
Obvi­ous­ly, John­son had spent some time on cam­pus with this cus­tomer. It became more of a friend­ship and a part­ner­ship than just a ven­dor rela­tion­ship. It was real­ly nice to see that.

Our EVS direc­tors are typ­i­cal­ly in back-to-back meet­ings and don’t have time for a sin­gle call. So, when they take their time to call us, we know they see the val­ue in using us as part of a sup­port sys­tem for their chal­lenges.

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For more infor­ma­tion about Smart Facil­i­ty Software’s client ser­vices, fill out our con­tact form, con­tact tech sup­port, or give us a call at 800–260‑8665.