fbpx

CAFM Software for Care Centres

KARE – CAFM and Facilities Management Software in Care Centres

 

Background to KARE and their requirements

KARE is a voluntary organisation providing a comprehensive range of services for individuals with intellectual disabilities and their families in their Care Centres in  County Kildare, East Offaly, West Wicklow and North Carlow.  It has 32 sites and several hundred staff, including volunteers.

Kare building 600

In late 2016 KARE published a Request for Tender for a Facilities Maintenance Request System.

KARE’s previous Facilities Maintenance Request System allowed their sites to log maintenance issues so that they could be dealt with ultimately by their pool of contractors.

KARE wanted to improve their internal processes around maintenance requests and needed a new system to enable smarter and more efficient prescribed workflow and allow better collaboration between all parties including:

  • Site contacts creating requests
  • Central facilities team managing incoming requests, and the prioritising and scheduling of the work to contractors
  • Contractors requested to create a quote which needed to be approved before the actual job could be started.
  • Contractors performing the work, signing off the job online and invoices to be created automatically.
  • KARE’s finance team handling the costs and accruals from the contractor work at KARE’s sites.  Integration of the costs from the new system into KARE’s finance system.

Trackplan was finally selected as the chosen facilities maintenance software solution provider.

The Trackplan Solution

KARE could see that Trackplan’s off the shelf cloud-based solution already included many of the required features to fulfil their requirements.  And Trackplan convinced the selection panel that it was well able to develop and enhance the solution to meet all its requirements.

The additional improvements would go into the product and so provide KARE with a sustainable solution that would continually improve from other client requirements.

 

Trackplan’s existing and relevant feature set already included:

  • Job request creation and approval process for requests created by site contacts.
  • Quote management, so quotes could be created by contractors and approved by the central facilities team into instructed jobs.
  • Costing of jobs and creation of budgets
  • Contractor online portal where contractors can view and complete instructed jobs, create quotes, and enter costs.
  • Categorisation of jobs by job type
  • Ease of use and trouble free roll out to 100s of users including site contacts and contractors
  • Advanced user management allowing control over site access and permissions and roles

 

Enhancements performed by Trackplan included:

  • Self-Billing for contractors – so Trackplan auto generated the invoices on behalf of the contractor to Trackplan once the costs were entered and approved by KARE.
  • Integration of the invoiced costs into KARE’s finance system
  • Creation of accrual reports and data, again to be integrated into KARE’s financial system.
  • Ability for site contacts to report on Trackplan how the job was performed once signed off complete by the contractor.
  • Tight workflow process from site contacts creating a request to job being fully signed off and ready for invoicing.

 

Project Delivery:

  • A fully detailed specification was produced by Trackplan and signed off by KARE.
  • Trackplan then performed the additional development over 3 months.
  • Trackplan assisted with the onboarding of data such as all the users and their associated roles, site access, and permissions.
  • Trackplan prepared specific training materials for the site contacts and the contractors.
  • KARE communicated the plan and requirements to all users and contractors.
  • The project was delayed by a few months mainly due to getting the legal and tax status for all contractors in place.
  • UAT was performed over 6 weeks and the system finally went live in early 2018.

 

Outcome:

The new system has been in use successfully since early 2018 with 100s of jobs being raised each month from the 32 sites, and fully delivered using the required workflow.

Naturally some teething problems occurred but were quickly ironed out by Trackplan.

 

Benefits:

  • Greater control of maintenance and the contractors.
  • Better visibility for all parties.
  • Time saved for the small central facilities team in managing maintenance.
  • Better control over maintenance costs and as a result cost savings are being realised.

 

Testimonial from Kare

“During the RFT Process KARE were immediately impressed by Trackplan’s off the shelf solution, and also by their ability and willingness to add new developments to more closely match KARE’s specific needs. Trackplan worked closely with us throughout the whole Project, understanding our initial process, but also being flexible when KARE started to realise the potential of the Trackplan software, enabling KARE to update our process with new features thereby increasing the effectiveness of the final application for us.

Of course, improving a process during a Project can lead to delays and stress, but Trackplan were always helpful and patient, and willing to implement the changes requested. This resulted in Trackplan delivering an off the shelf solution that had been adapted to our updated process, introducing extra features like handling RCT Tax, importing Invoices and Accruals into our Financial System, and enabling KARE to keep track of contracts with Contractors to ensure budget and procurement rules were adhered to. All of this with a system that is intuitive and easy to use.

The rollout and go live of Trackplan was smoother than we could have hoped for, and this was due to the work Trackplan did in having everything working in the background and having extensive testing and training materials in place. The Trackplan Project is viewed as a very successful one within KARE and has vastly improved the management of Facilities Maintenance Requests for KARE, ensuring that issues in our sites are dealt with quickly and effectively.”

Jason Browne
Head of IT
Kare