Santa Clara County Office of Education Modernizes Work Orders

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In March, when Coyote Creek flooded Santa Clara, County in California, local elementary schools had to deal with how to clean up the mess and ensure a return to school that was both safe and expedient. The schools were able to do that through a coordinated response that resulted in only two temporarily displaced students and a fully functional campus.

In order to achieve this goal, disaster responders had to mobilize hundreds of volunteers – many of them teachers – in order to salvage their own classrooms. According to John Gomez from the Santa Clara County Office of Education, part of this process was facilitated by the district’s recent move to a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), which allows the office to centrally manage work orders.

“In August 2016, we decided to switch to a CMMS and we have since managed 1200 work orders through the system,” Gomez explains in an interview with CivSource.

Santa Clara’s Office Education decided to go with WorkStraight for its CMMS system, which allows for work orders to be created, tracked and analyzed through a centralized system. WorkStraight puts work orders into a single area and generates dashboards that can give planners visibility into what work is being done across the system, ensures that issues are resolved and creates reports for after-action analysis.

“We had another system for managing work orders before WorkStraight,” Gomez says, “but the dashboards were big for us.”

WorkStraight, which was founded in 2013, is relatively new to the business processing space, but they are picking up steam with public sector groups that need to manage large amounts of work orders spread over disparate areas.

“We are a relatively small team – 5 engineers and several partner vendors, but we are expanding quickly,” says Meredith Crawford, CEO of WorkStraight. The company is slated to add a mobile app, time clock, and GPS support for work order tracking in the field.

Going forward the company plans to keep building out its partner network as well, QuickBooks integration is on the way, for example. “What we want to do is make work orders as easy to track as other aspects of the business, we see a strong need for these features,” Crawford says.