The Struggle is Real. The Solution is AppWork.

In previous decades, property management companies equated growth with acquisitions. Another way to grow is by increasing operational efficiencies.

Your Struggle: Chronic Labor Shortage

According to the NAAEI&slquo;s Apartment Jobs Snapshot, 35.6% of job postings in the apartment industry are for maintenance positions (compared to 17.5% for leasing and 18.7% for property management). Everyone in the multifamily industry needs more maintenance technicians, and no one can ever find enough (or keep enough as churn rates continue to be high).

Solution: Centralization

Your Gain: Stretch your maintenance budget

For a long time, the industry standard has been to have a 1:100 ratio of maintenance technicians to units. For owners with multiple properties in the same city, aggregating supervisors and technicians to serve more than one property will create an opportunity to break the old standard.

Our AutoAssign feature means less work for supervisors. When a new work order comes in, AppWork will match the work order category with the skillset of each technician and consider how many work orders each technician has, before assigning the work order (without any manual input). Less work for supervisors ultimately leads to needing fewer supervisors.

AppWork starts with 14 categories and 56 subcategories for work orders. Within an individual technician&slquo;s profile, you can see how many work orders they completed within each category. You can also see the number of callbacks and withdrawals for each category. Over time, this gives you a clear picture of that technician‘s strengths and weaknesses.

If you see that a certain tech performs poorly within the plumbing category, you can choose to provide the appropriate training or remove the plumbing category from that technician&slquo;s skillset. When you create a work order, that technician won&slquo;t appear as an option for assignment. If you enable AutoAssign, the app won&slquo;t assign plumbing tasks to that technician.

On the other hand, if you have a service technician that excels in fixing plumbing issues, you can make them the go-to person for plumbing tasks at multiple properties.

Your Struggle: Technician Dead Time

Solution: Optimize techs with tech

Your Gain: Prune away dead time

Do you know how many hours your techs are working within the time available? If a technician appears to work 15 hours in a 40-hour week, they most likely are the victim of a time vampire. AppWork helps to mitigate these monsters by increasing operational efficiencies. Our goal is to enable three technicians to operate at the same level as four.

AppWork places more emphasis on technician management than any other multifamily maintenance platform. First, we offer a technician dashboard that provides and overview of all technicians from one or more properties.

With one tap, you can see which technicians have the highest ratings, the fastest completion times, the most completed work orders, and the most callbacks. Furthermore, you can filter this information by property and date range. The data found in the technician dashboard is easy to export or download.

Included with the technician dashboard is an on-call calendar that enables you to easily assign on-call times and manage them.

If you still print work orders, or even write them manually, switching to our digital, cloud-based system will save supervisors and technicians hours every week. No more lost work orders.

Need to assign a new work order to a technician already on-site? Automated syncing between the admin portal and the tech app eliminates technicians going back and forth to the office all day. This could potentially add an extra hour of working time to each day for a tech.

Once work orders are digitized, you can clearly see the workload of every technician. In a paper situation it&slquo;s hard to track the amount of time spent on callbacks and technicians can spend a lot of time working in a black hole.

With AppWork, every callback is clearly documented. AppWork helps both supervisors and technician manage time better.

Your Struggle: An Increasing Reliance on Vendors

As a result of the chronic technician shortage, most communities find themselves needing to call in third-party vendors more and more. Using a vendor costs more than using an on-site team member. To stretch your maintenance budget further, it&slquo;s critical to improve vendor management.

Our Solution: Increased vendor transparency

Your Gain: Using high-quality vendors

How do you decide which vendor is best for the job? Most managers pick the one they always use or pick the one they feel is better. With AppWork, you can stop guessing which vendor is the best and start knowing.

Start tracking vendor skillsets the same way you can track on-site maintenance teams. You&slquo;ll be able to see at a glance how many work orders and callbacks each vendor has within each category. Over time, this feature will provide valuable insights into which vendors complete work orders the first time, and which vendors need multiple trips.

Better yet, with AppWork, you can start seeing how your residents feel about a vendor&slquo;s quality of work. Our software sends automated emails to residents asking for their feedback. We are the only maintenance management platform offering this feature.

This game-changing feature will both empower you and your residents. You&slquo;ll have real-world data for daily decision making and your residents will have a voice when dealing with third-party vendors.

Your Struggle: Lost or Inadequate Documentation

Some common refrains bouncing around the office might include: “Where&slquo;s that work order?” “When did the technician first fix this?” “The resident says one thing and the tech another. What really happened?”

With AppWork, all of your work orders will be stored in the cloud and easily searchable.

Our Solution: Automated Digital Documentation

Your Gain: Improved compliance

Data integrity is a core tenant of AppWork. With our digital work order system, no one can delete work orders, and administrators cannot complete work orders. Work orders can only be marked complete by a service technician or vendor using the technician app.

Only residents can rate work orders from within the resident app or portal. The ratings cannot be modified or deleted by an administrator.

Plus, with all of your data stored in the cloud, work orders can&slquo;t be misplaced or lost.

From the moment you open a work order, every action and comment is recorded in a clear timeline. If a technician needs a part, that will be recorded. If the technician shows up and can&slquo;t get in, that will also be recorded.

In the technician app, techs have two options: completing the work order or withdrawing from it. When completing a work order, the app requires technicians to take a picture for physical proof of completion. The picture uploads with a time stamp, proving the technician‘s physical presence inside the unit.

If a technician withdraws from a work order, they must indicate why. AppWork plans on standardizing all withdrawal reasons so that this data will be easy to track and monitor.