Anyone in the SNHU community who has experienced an issue with the on-campus facilities may be familiar with work orders. Yet, many students may not know that facilities changed the process in which work orders can be submitted during the month of January.
A work order is a work ticket someone submits to facilities when there is a problem that needs to be fixed. In the past, students would have to go through a resident assistant (RA) or a resident director (RD) to submit work orders. Now, facilities has cut out the middle person and students can send their work orders themselves through MySNHU.
Scott Greeb, a senior director at the office of facilities, spearheaded the change to the work order system.
“We can better serve the campus, and we can better serve the campus faster if we allow to put work orders on the spot,” Greeb said.
Greeb saw the problems of the work order system and knew it had to be fixed. In the past when the work order system wasn’t fully electronic, the system was slow and could lead to work orders never being completed. Greeb and his new system changed all that and made it fully electronic.
So, now a student can submit a work order electronically. Student can go onto their mySNHU dashboard and scroll down until they see the facilities tab on the left. They can click the link which says, “Submit a Maintenance Request/Work Order” and follow the instructions from there. The submission will be received by the department in facilities which the problem concerns. For example, if a student has a leak in their room and they send in a work order, that work order will be sent to the plumbing department of facilities.
This change will speed up the work order process and reduce the amount of orders that are lost or forgotten. Facilities workers are now armed with tablets and can get these work orders right away from their respected departments.
Students find this system much easier than the old route so far, and Greeb enjoys the benefits the system gives to facilities.
“The new system allows me to report better on the data and really focus on the things I want to look at and then make a change and see if we are getting better,” he said.
With the new system, Greeb can now track and collect data that he couldn’t before. Greeb can see what jobs workers are on and track how many hours they work, but because the system is new, there are many improvements that can still be made.
One of the main reasons for the switch of the new system was for safety. Greeb reflected on the fire that burned down Greeley Hall last year and expressed that maybe if the new system was in place, it could have caught the electrical problem that lead to the fire in the dorm.
Jasmine McFarlin (’20), a first year RA in Kingston, spoke about how the new work order system will work for students.
“I think it’s effective as long as people are accountable for putting [the work orders] in,” she said. She believes that the new system is effective, but not enough people know about how to submit a work order through mySNHU.
Facilities is doing their best to work out the kinks, but after the online system has been used for a full year, they will hopefully be able to use analytics to show whether this system is more efficient than the old one.
