Bates College Switches to Asset Essentials for Cost-Effective, Customizable Facilities Maintenance Management

Increasing IT efficiency 

Because Bates’ previous CMMS was hosted on site, the college’s IT department was required to perform regular maintenance and keep the system updated. And now with Asset Essentials, a cloud-based CMMS, the IT team has more bandwidth to assist the facilities maintenance staff with more strategic pursuits. 

“A cloud-based solution has taken the administrative burden off the IT team, allowing them to support us in more ways than just updating the product,” says Tim Pratt, director of facility services operations. “They are now able to focus on system integrations that help us become more efficient in our processes.”

Prioritizing work orders 

Bates’ previous system was completely customizable, so the team wanted to make sure that a new, out-of-the-box solution would allow customization. With built-in application programming interface (API), Asset Essentials has been a good fit, Pratt and Moreau say. 

For example, widespread workforce shortages in the facilities industry mean that maintenance teams can’t always complete requested work orders as quickly as they’d like. Pratt and his team wanted to be able to provide requestors with an expected date of completion when they make a work order request. Working with Moreau’s IT team, they implemented a plug-in via API that leverages Asset Essentials’ priority leveling system and current workload to categorize each work request into a priority level and automatically deliver an expected date of completion via email to the requestor. 

“We can easily extract the data we need from Asset Essentials and populate expected dates of completion based on the timing of the request and the type of job,” Moreau says. “Our previous solution was highly customizable, but we’ve found enough flexibility in Asset Essentials to easily mold it to the processes we needed.” 

Maximizing features 

One of the reasons Bates College chose Asset Essentials was its cost-effectiveness, Pratt says. “We felt the pricing model would allow us to grow with the product,” Pratt says. “As a small liberal arts college, we don’t have a large facilities staff for which we need to purchase a bunch of licenses. But with the pricing model, we can explore and use all the product features we need.”