Logistics with B

After our first round of interviews, we decided that a lot of problems that we noticed were logistical in nature, so I interviewed B, one of the electrical shop's admins.  

A Request

He walked me through the process of a request.  First, someone goes to bgm.stanford.edu or calls it in.  Then, they can request an estimate, request maintenance, or request a new installation that they (the department, not BGM) will fund.  Then, someone from BGM makes up a work order.  This is a manual process because it sometimes requires approval or other adjustments.

The system that they make the work orders in, EAM, doesn't let you adjust the release date, and you can only bill for work that happens after the release date.  Thus, if someone calls in an emergency and work starts before the work order is made, the person making the work order has to remember to back-date the release date.

Once a work order is made, it's assigned to a person, and it's tidied up.  Sometimes, another BGM group like construction will accidentally select electric, or sometimes the person making the request fills the information out in a vague way, so to help the workers, the admins will make the work orders more explicit.

Then, the person that the work order is assigned to can see it on their "bench," which appears online, on their PDA, or on their iPad.

Technology

B's biggest gripes were about the technology.  They're phasing out their Nextels (cell phones that they use to talk with each other for work stuff), but they started phasing out the cell towers before phasing out the phones, so the reception is horrible.  

Work orders often disappear from the bench on PDAs due to a bug that they reported, but it doesn't seem like it will be resolved.  They also get bad reception.

My dad does HVAC, and when he works, he's always afraid about breaking his cell phone, so he sometimes leaves it in the car, and he never got a smartphone, so I asked if it was similar in the electric shop.  The workers do often leave their PDAs in the car because they don't want to break it, so it seems like the problem isn't just bad technology, but also that people don't feel comfortable to use the technology that they have.

As B was going through the request process, I also asked him some about the EAM system.  He was an expert at it, but the process was still cumbersome -- he used an advanced search, but he couldn't save it, so he had to remake the search every day.  And the system is much too complicated for other people.  It isn't user friendly, and it has too much information.  Also, you can't be logged in to Axess and EAM at the same time, so B needs to use two web browsers.

Misc

Institutional knowledge is mostly spread from person to person.  There are some new projects like the maps.

It's hard to make good indoor maps because outside contractors might change things without telling us, so the maps would not be up to date.

There's a big backlog in January because disuse is bad for lights, and the university closed over winter break.  They sometimes want to bring in temps to help deal with the backlog, but the process for hiring a temp can take weeks, by which point the backlog is already dealt with.

The office space is limited, and so are the parking spaces.  Thus, it would be hard to hire new people even if they had the money.