Fellowship Bible Church of Northwest Arkansas’ first meeting was held in 1983 by seven families in the home of one of the founding members. Over the following year, the church grew rapidly, and after renting facilities for a few years, they constructed their own first campus in 1991. Since then, they host approximately 7,000 members of the congregation each Sunday at both of its locations in Rogers and Fayetteville. With sprawling acreage and thousands of square feet of facility space at both locations, the church needed a strong system in place to manage their facilities and operations.
Need for change
John Marquette joined the church 19 years ago, working on the ministry side before becoming the Director of Buildings and Grounds. With a background in real estate and construction, John took the lead on building Fellowship’s second campus in Fayetteville. In addition to the 100 acres and 240,000 square feet of the original campus, the new facility, completed in 2016, added another 26 acres and 63,000 square feet of facility space to the facilities and maintenance teams’ workload.
Anticipating the second facility’s completion, John turned his attention to internal operations – and could see that the church needed an upgrade for their current system, which had been created 10 years ago. The solution wasn’t user friendly and was overly complex for what the team needed.
“Once I got into this role and I was looking at the system that we had, I got frustrated,” John said. “I did some reading, and I got on the International Facility Management Association (IFMA) and discovered computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS).”
After looking at a few other CMMS providers on the market, John wound up choosing Brightly due to its ease of use. “In the end, it was the compatibility to what we did for keeping it really simple, and the language was user-friendly,” he said. “I sat through a few different demos with different members of my team, and it just made sense. Brightly was the easiest to use and implement.”
Taking ownership
When the team began to use the Brightly platform, John began to see changes in how they approached their work almost immediately with more intentionality into work order completion. Now, the team is more productive than ever, and they’re also able to address any problems they see in the field.
“One of the benefits I’ve seen is that now all our maintenance technicians and custodial staff have ownership over creating work orders,” he said. “So if someone sees something that’s broken on the facility, they can create a work order that will go to the right person, so nothing gets passed over.”
John describes the change in workflow as a self-managing process thanks to these automated task assignment features. When the team gathers at the beginning of each week to share their tasks, everyone knows what they need to do. This has cut down significantly on time that would be spent on delegating tasks, freeing up John’s workload to focus on bigger projects.
Having the ability to create work orders at any stage with automated assignments has been hugely beneficial to ensure that the facilities and grounds are well maintained and welcoming. And, with more visibility and data, John was been able to prove his team’s worth and justify hires based on work order history and detailed documentation.
Handling the unexpected
In addition to proactively taking care of any problem areas and identifying issues before they occur, John has been able to prepare for almost everything – almost.
Even with all their careful planning, you can’t prepare for the truly unexpected, and when lightning struck their property last year, the church had $32,000 of damage to the rooftop and electronic equipment. But by pulling in work orders from their CMMS, John was able to accurately track costs for subcontractors, resources, in-house labor and more. By having an exact dollar amount with supporting documents, he felt confident when it came time to submit to their insurance.
“The claim worker said it was the easiest claim he’d ever worked on,” John said. “I could not pull that number prior to Brightly.”
Long-term success
With ongoing access to support and training, John feels that they are well set up for success long-term.
“I was scared to take this on, I was scared to go in this direction and what it would entail,” John said. “Brightly got me up to speed so I could get my team up to speed, and what I couldn’t do, I could send them to Brightly. Our access that we have to support and help is incredible.”
“It’s been a game changer for us,” he added.
From just a workflow standpoint and getting things done in a timely manner, it’s been a game changer.
