Whatever else your daily challenges are running a senior living and care residence, the comfort of the residents is always center stage. And very often, that correlates with how capable your maintenance team is. And your maintenance team can only be as good as your maintenance processes allow.

You need to make reporting issues easy, yet reliable.

When someone notices a problem — anything from a door that needs fixing to a water leak to the heating not working — you need a reliable process for that information not only getting to your maintenance team but actually getting dealt with.

In many senior living communities, such reports might be as simple as someone catching the maintenance guy in the hallway and verbally telling him — or telling other community staff members and hoping the issue gets passed on.

The danger, of course, is that the information doesn’t get passed on. When the person receiving the information isn’t directly responsible for completing the task (or even if he or she is), it can be very easy to simply forget or make a note and lose it before having a chance to more formally record it.

The result is, the issue isn’t addressed when the resident expects it to be, and the resident suffers with the downtime of the equipment in the meantime.

You can eliminate these problems with computerized maintenance management.

What you may need is a robust digital process for managing your senior living community maintenance tasks.

Rather than relying on inefficient paper-based systems, or even a spreadsheet system you’ve developed over time, a ready-made computerized maintenance management system, or CMMS, comes poised to handle all your maintenance requirements.

When an issue is reported, it goes right into your system and is categorized correctly, making it easy to manage when and how it should be addressed. Better yet, if your CMMS has mobile capabilities, you can eliminate those instances in which the information doesn’t actually make it to the maintenance department.

Your maintenance staff members won’t forget to enter the task, for instance, if the moment someone lets them know about something, they can open an app on their phone, wherever they are, and enter it instantly.

You’ll have more comfortable residents with a more flexible maintenance task system.

What all this means is, as things inevitably break and need your maintenance department’s attention, you increase your success rate at quickly responding to these issues and resolve them faster.

From the time a resident notices a unit is too cold to when the resident once again able to set the thermostat to a comfortable temperature, a resident suffers. Reduce that time and you’re providing a better experience for the resident and keeping him or her happy and feeling well attended to.

Are you finding that too many maintenance tasks are getting forgotten or slipping out of your system, leaving your senior living residents getting more and more frustrated? If so, then you’ll want to check out the possibilities afforded by a good CMMS.