layton Crawford, director of facility management and services for McKesson Corp., oversees a vast portfolio of 300 active properties encompassing some 16 million sq. ft. (1.5 million sq. m.) That’s a lot of real estate to maintain and a lot of work orders to track. For the past three years, McKesson has used Trammell Crow Corporation’s (TCC) ServiceExpress platform, a customized version of Mainstream Software’s CrossForm work order management system. Crawford reports a positive experience.
“We went from nothing to ServiceExpress and it has provided standardization and consistency of problem response and reporting,” Crawford says. “It gives us a lot better matrix around response
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| Yon Carpenter |
times and information on perpetual problem areas.
“For certain buildings, we have divided responsibilities,” he says. “One organization takes care of the physical buildings and another takes care of office services. ServiceExpress provides a one-stop shop so users don’t have to worry about who to call about what kind of services. ServiceExpress routes to the appropriate party.”
BP Oil is another ServiceExpress user. Yon Carpenter is an engineering business systems manager at the company’s regional retail marketing headquarters in La Palma, Calif. He says the platform is used to route service orders on his building such as plumbing requests.
“I really like it,” Carpenter says. “It makes requests easier to make and track and we’re able to repeat requests. It’s easy to use and we get quick response.”
CrossForm is a Web-based computerized maintenance management system. TCC has customized it to make facilities management more efficient and has re-branded it as ServiceExpress.
Carl Walko, TCC’s ServiceExpress program manager, says TCC rolled the platform out to its first client about five years ago and it’s now used by about 35 corporate clients.
It is also used in hundreds of TCC’s national property management offices.
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| Carl Walko |
Walko says TCC’s philosophy is to be an enabler of processes.
“We continue to roll it out on the corporate side as well as the institutional side,” says Walko, a 30-plus-year facilities management veteran. “We customize quite a bit, but the unusual part of that is that our agreement with Mainstream is that anything we customize in the software has to become part of their off-the-shelf base product with their next release.”
Walko says TCC went through an exhaustive vetting process before selecting the Mainstream software.
“Before, every client was using other products and we were having problems because the software was dictating processes and was also causing us to have to put in processes that were long and slow and ineffective. I put together a team including property managers and engineers and came up with a wish list of items they wanted in software.
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We boiled that down to 150 items and weighed them from the very important to ‘it would be nice to have, but not critical.’ We then looked at hundreds of different packages and ended up with four finalists.
“You can use it in a simple environment or a complicated environment,” Walko says of the product. “We needed the ability to flag critical assets at critical sites at data centers, for example, that are required by one of our manufacturing clients.”
