Short, medium, and long term fixes, make sure you do all three!

A customer calls you: there’s water everywhere in the kitchen! 

1. Short term fix: turn the water off. 
2. Medium-term fix: replace the faulty valve that caused the leak. 
3. Long term fix: understand why the valve broke down.

Most people will do the first two: the short and the medium-term fixes. After all, the customer usually stops complaining after step two, so why bother?

If you’re not doing step 3, you’re not learning from that crisis, and this will most likely come back and bite you in that rear part of your anatomy.

Why did this happen?

Nobody wants another customer calling in the middle of the night with water up to his/her ankles again.

Good maintenance and operation people will try to think about the root cause of the problem and get to the bottom of the issue.

Outstanding maintenance and operation organization make sure that everyone in the maintenance and operation team understands that they need to think about long term fixes too.

Investigate the root cause of the issue. That’s how you will find that the valve that was installed was not the correct model.

That’s how you can do preventive maintenance and that's how you will be able to plan and check for all these types of valves in all your locations.

Make sure you learn from each incident:

Back in 2015, we realized that we spent a lot of money sending people to flats at odd hours in the night and on weekends. 

Our occupants needed us there and then: they couldn’t open the safe in their room, the passports are in there, and they have a flight in 4 hours!

The clock is ticking. Adrenaline is pumping. People have to run and rush. We have to pay overtime.

Why was this happening? Our safes were battery operated. The battery was dead: the safe lock wasn’t working anymore.

We changed our procedure and decided to replace the batteries every six months, in all our safes, no matter what.

That type of problem disappeared.

Implement an incident management system:

It’s hard to keep track of that sort of thing. If you manage a large operation you have to rely on a system. Post its are not enough when you manage about a hundred and fifty properties and have different people working on the same flats.

We had an incident management system in place (the great-granddad of Unee-T) back at LMB. That system allowed us to realize that we had to repaint the same wall in the same flat a total of three times over 18 months: the paint was peeling over and over in the same spot.

It turned out that there was a cracked pipe leaking inside that wall. The paint peeling was just the symptom of a much larger problem.

It’s critical today to have the capabilities to record seemingly unrelated incidents. It will help you identify patterns and find out those things you can learn from and improve.

The new generation of property management companies and real estate professionals needs a tool to make it easy to record all the issues in their properties.

This is one of the reasons why we created Unee-T, THE Web App to manage incidents in your properties. 

If you have to remember only one thing from this post:

If you’re the leader of a maintenance or operation team, if you want to save money, improve how you do things, and increase your customer satisfaction, then make sure you get to the root cause of the problem.

DON’T OVERLOOK THE LONG TERM FIX!

What about your experience: can you share a story when your focus on the long term fix helped your organization become better?