With over 17,500 students, it takes a lot of work to keep up with the facilities at Columbia Public School District. Christy Serrage, Assistant Director of Facilities, has juggled the task of having a smaller facilities team to handle all their requests and allocate resources efficiently for quite some time.
The data to "keep proving impact"
When Christy – an expert user of Brightly software – was asked to illustrate the value of using Brightly properly, she immediately turned to the Brightly’s KPI dashboard. Using her school’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Christy was able to analyze the amount of work orders open, the amount of time it takes to complete work orders, the amount of preventive maintenance work orders and many more benchmarking data points.
Ultimately, she was able to pull information from her dashboard to demonstrate her team’s heavy workload and identify areas that needed more attention. She shared this information with key stakeholders, such as her Financial Officer and Deputy Superintendent over Facilities, and was successful in raising awareness and illustrating the importance of properly utilizing Brightly software. She successfully gained the support from administration to require faculty usage of Brightly, the first step in the right direction for Columbia Public School District.
Using the KPI dashboard, Christy benchmarks her team’s performance against data from similar schools across the nation and has even received advice from a neighboring Brightly user. He suggested using the KPI dashboard to uncover ways other successful schools are saving money. Christy is now monitoring specific success metrics to highlight how Brightly software supports the district’s goals, allowing them to create an optimal learning environment for students and teachers. By doing so she is able to quickly respond to questions and justify the value of both their investment and their staff.
Data insight leads to impactful leadership
With the data at her fingertips, Christy was also able to discover areas in her department that needed improvement. The insight led her team to develop a new process for handling their facilities called a “work week system.” Christy explained, “First they take 20-30 minutes a week to discuss work order numbers open, closed, completed, and then focus on the 3 buildings that need the most attention at the time.” By doing so, their team was able to improve productivity–and prove it using their KPI dashboard.
Her team even fixed areas that weren’t receiving enough attention. For example, some schools would more openly communicate their needs or be less patient to receive the team’s help, while other schools seemed to be far more patient and less outspoken about their needs. Ultimately, this led to some schools unfairly receiving requests quicker than others and a poor allocation of resources.
Now, through their updated work week system and with the help of data from their KPI Dashboard, the team is much more effective in their goal of creating the optimal learning environment for all of their 17,500 students. The number of open work orders has dropped drastically, preventive maintenance work orders are being taken care of effectively, and the orders are being completed in a much more timely fashion.
In fact, the data pulled from our KPI Dashboard,” Christy shared, “has also helped us add 2 additional positions to our team.
Columbia Public Schools’ facility team continues to work hard to increase adoption of Brightly software amongst their faculty. The KPI dashboard has helped them allocate resources more effectively, receive additional personnel and gain support from their administration to promote the use of Brightly. The team measures success against their own goals and compares their success with similar districts across the nation to ensure things continue in the right direction for the school district.
