By Bryan Christiansen
The most popular time that homeowners book contractors for their home repairs or maintenance needs is during the Spring and Summer months (i.e. from May to September). This period is known as the peak season for contractors and it is a popular choice because of the ideal weather conditions that allow work to run smoothly. But like any other thing, peak season comes with its challenges—for instance, the pace of work can become overwhelming. However, there are ways in which contractors can manage this period and navigate peak-season pressure.
Before you get overwhelmed by numerous work orders, tool inventory issues, and heaps of calls from angry clients, here's how you can be better positioned to handle the next busy season.
#1 Contract Management
One of the first major undertakings for contractors during busy seasons is to negotiate, create, and manage contracts for every single job that they will undertake. However, each contract stage is time-consuming and often prone to data entry errors.
With contract management solutions, also known as contract lifecycle management (CLM), contractors are guaranteed a valuable tool to help make the contracting process faster while decreasing financial and audit risks. Some of the features these apps offer include:
Content and contract library
Numerous customizable contract templates
Contract duplication
E-signature
Real-time notifications
Payment processing
#2 Reporting
Typically, when the pace of work becomes intense, everyone is so focused on executing tasks and delivering quality that staff may struggle to find time to document their daily activities.
However, frequent updates via reporting is vital to ensure that things are on track. If reports are continually skipped, contractors could face unpleasant surprises like missed deadlines, delays, and cost overruns.
Previously, project reporting was handled through a combination of paper records, and spreadsheets. Fortunately these days, several daily work reporting apps exist to simplify the creation, sharing, and viewing of daily reports.
Furthermore, almost all daily reporting brands are available on mobile phones and devices; thus from any location, workers can take pictures, record video and audio messages with their mobile phones, build up a report, upload it, then move on to other tasks. This speeds up the reporting process and minimizes the chances for procrastination. Some benefits of daily reporting solutions are:
Customizable templates for monitoring and tracking work done or in progress.
Easy logging of any internal issues or challenges all with a few clicks.
#3 Managing work orders
On paper, it can sound like a dream come true to have multiple work requests pouring in from different homeowners, but assigning, creating, and tracking work simultaneously across different locations can become tricky with the increased risks of missing important deadlines.
There’s a lot of monitoring required to ensure that each request from individual homeowners is recorded and assigned to a proper work order and that it gets the required attention at the appropriate time.
These work orders will typically contain all necessary work instructions, details of materials needed, images, relevant documents, standard operating practices, and so on.
There are various stand-alone work order tracking solutions that contractors can use to assign work and ensure that it is completed in a timely fashion. However, these kinds of solutions offer limited functions. Also, they lack the convenience and robust functionalities of a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). Therefore, it’s advisable to opt for a CMMS as an all-in-one work order management and maintenance management solution.
With work order management, contractors can:
Estimate and track labor, parts and miscellaneous costs across various jobs.
Track safety procedures.
Track equipment history and downtime.
Quickly assign labor hours
Display outstanding work for specified periods, whether days, weeks, or months.
Create traceable records for regulatory audits and insurance purposes.
#4 Tool tracking and management
During busy seasons, many contractors will face the frustration of work disruptions due to issues like unavailable or misplaced equipment and tools.
This happens commonly when the same set of workers are covering multiple locations, they can easily lose track of tools and smaller mobile equipment as they move these items from one work site to another.
To minimize these problems, contractors can use tool tracking systems. These systems are designed to enable site workers to manage their work tools better and pinpoint the exact location of any tools registered on the system. Specifically, tool tracking systems allow workers to:
Confirm tool and equipment availability.
Access a central record of tools movement and history.
Track who is in possession of each tool and small equipment at any time.
Easily build a tools catalogue.
Assign tools and equipment to individuals, teams, or to specific jobs.
Use their mobile phones as a barcode scanner when searching for tools.
#5 Optimal equipment maintenance
To succeed during the busy season, all machinery and gadgets need to be up to date, safe for usage, and ready to go. So, upfront planning of equipment maintenance, repairs, and inspections, for the entire busy season is key to making it through this season with minimal downtime. But first, contractors need to be clear on which maintenance strategy they will be using.
To simplify the process of implementing a maintenance strategy with all the required planning involved, contractors don’t need to look any further than using a modern best-in-class computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) like Limble CMMS. Even the busiest contractors will find a CMMS to be an invaluable resource as it enables its users to:
Plan and schedule maintenance activities for multiple assets with a few clicks.
Generate, assign, and track work orders for all maintenance tasks on the go.
Communicate with all team members and update them about maintenance-related information in real-time across multiple work sites.
Monitor equipment health.
Track stock levels and manage spare parts inventory.
Generate and view maintenance reports.
In Conclusion
When it comes to peak season, there’s a lot that can go wrong. Unfortunately, all it takes to fail as a small business contractor is when the business has a reputation for poorly managed workflow and debilitating maintenance issues.
Bryan Christiansen is the founder and CEO of Limble CMMS. Limble is a modern, easy-to-use mobile CMMS software that takes the stress and chaos out of maintenance by helping managers organize, automate, and streamline their maintenance operations.