The City of Richland in Eastern Washington is on the path to becoming the “go-to” city for efficiency and maximizing financial resources that belies its population of 48,000 residents. Toward this objective, the City Council has created a 5 year strategic plan that defines 7 key pillars that will be completed over the next 5 years. Pillars include implementing cost- effective measures for leveraging assets through collaborative efforts as well as ensuring a sustainable long-term maintenance program is in place for existing facilities and infrastructures. As part of the process, the City Manager has asked the Parks and Recreation department to launch a pilot program.

Tim Werner, Parks and Facilities Manager, knew this would be a challenging task for his team of 22 employees without the use of a CMMS system. Currently, Tim is tasked with maintaining 10 city owned buildings including a museum, library, police and fire departments, office buildings and numerous parks. A CMMS system was desired to help manage the process of implementing a long-term asset life cycle reporting by tracking maintenance costs and associating them to specific buildings and other assets. The eMaint system supports “maintain vs. repair” decisions, analysis of data in the cycle, and tracking expenses relative to the budget.

Tim’s initial challenge was defining all assets in extraordinary detail to match the city time keeping system. Within a specific building ID and room #, each asset needs to be accounted for including electrical equipment, roofing, and floors and walls down to the square footage of carpet and sheet rock. By entering the inventory of the interior and exterior of all buildings, the maintenance department can tie costs for work performed back to individual parks and facilities. Each facility and park has data organized hierarchically by site, location, room, and asset. In addition to compiling a master list of assets, standardized tasks and procedures were established by Tim and his team for recurring work that the city performs and tracks for all buildings and assets.

Currently, accurate data of time being spent by asset, task and site is imported into the eMaint system and then related to each facility. The resulting reports assist with planning, budgeting and staffing as the City moves to complete each Key pillar. In order to maximize financial resources, eMaint’s facility management software highlights where money and time is being spent, aiding in the decision-making process as to when to continue to invest in maintaining current facilities versus the cost of replacing them. After completing the pilot program on each type of facility and park, the plan will be rolled out to the remaining facilities.

Tim W., Parks and Facilities Manager, City of Richland