Hotel Maintenance Software
Hotel maintenance software is designed to help the maintenance team of hotels and resorts get their work done much faster and more efficiently, streamlining workflows and optimizing maintenance costs.
Hotel preventative maintenance solutions play a significant role in the hospitality industry, especially with the technology advancements associated with hotel and resort management. Modern resorts and hotels nowadays are using a wide variety of smart devices, from smart TVs to automatic lighting, electric blinds, electronic door locks and tap sensors. With all this technology becoming prevalent, hotel managers and maintenance team members need a software solution that is equally smart and capable of ensuring the safety, performance and condition of such hotel assets. This is where maintenance software for hotels becomes truly invaluable to every personnel working in the industry.
Hotel maintenance involves a broad range of maintenance processes and activities that are necessary to maintain hotel facilities, equipment and other major assets in good working condition. This is what hotel maintenance software is meant for. The software market is filled with different types of hotel maintenance systems, from standalone cloud-based solutions to fully integrated hotel management software platforms that offer preventive maintenance tools as a separate module or as part of its core feature set. There are also hotels and resorts that use what is referred to as a computerized maintenance management system or CMMS as their primary hotel maintenance solution.
Hotel maintenance software is a crucial component in the asset management process for hotels and resorts. It is a vital piece of technology that plays an important role to the success of any business in the hospitality industry. This type of software is available as a standalone best-in-class solution, providing a wide variety of features and capabilities that are designed to make the jobs of maintenance personnel easier and more productive. However, it is also available as a module for comprehensive platforms like hotel management systems, hotel asset management and CMMS solutions. In fact, many hotel businesses use CMMS as their main solution for the upkeep of their facilities and assets.
Compared to hotel maintenance solutions, CMMS or computerized maintenance management system is comprised of different solutions that enable not just maintenance management, but also staff and workplace management, asset management, facilities management and even inventory management. It helps to simplify workflows for the maintenance department, streamline their tasks and centralizes the communication process in order to make maintenance activities easier and more efficient. CMMS solutions help hotel and resort establishments monitor the upkeep of all their facilities and assets, including the related costs. The main goal is to extend the lifespan of all hotel assets at minimal cost.
The key difference between hotel maintenance software and CMMS is the functionality. CMMS is not just for hotel maintenance management; it can also be tailored to facilitate the management of various assets, facilities, fleets, equipment and other forms of machinery. However, there are a few key features and tools that may overlap between the two software solutions. Among them is work order management, which is crucial regardless of what kind of maintenance process is involved. This process involves the creation, assignment, processing and completion of work orders. These can be hotel room maintenance, scheduled upkeep of the hotel swimming pool, replacing batteries on TV remotes— anything that involves a specific maintenance task.
Preventive and predictive maintenance are also common functions in both hotel maintenance systems and CMMS. Preventive maintenance involves following a routine maintenance schedule on specific equipment and assets. The goal with this process is to conduct routine, non-emergency maintenance on hotel assets before they get damaged and require repairs. This involves cleaning the swimming pool, conducting inspections on the gym equipment, cleaning the elevator system, replacing dead light bulbs, checking the hotel computer systems, etc. Preventive maintenance allows hotel and resort managers to create a detailed maintenance plan for recurring tasks, thus avoiding serious failures in the future.
Predictive maintenance, on the other hand, is conducted based on the changes in performance of some of the hotel assets. For example, predictive maintenance can be performed on the hotel boiler when its performance starts to dip. The boiler is crucial in providing heated water to all the rooms where guests are staying, so it must be constantly monitored, perhaps in real time, to ensure consistent performance. The heating, ventilation and air conditioning or HVAC system must also be constantly monitored through predictive maintenance. With condition monitoring, hotel maintenance staff can ensure more effective upkeep of all hotel facilities and assets, while also minimizing maintenance costs.
Stock or inventory management is another key function of hotel maintenance software. While there are standalone inventory management solutions available for larger businesses and organizations, an inventory management module in a best-in-class hotel maintenance system should be enough to meet the requirements of any hotel or resort establishment. This particular feature is meant to help hotel managers and their maintenance teams keep track of certain amenities such as the complimentary hygiene kit in every hotel bathroom, the food and beverage in every fridge in every hotel room, the towels, linens, pillows, etc. All these are inventory that need to be monitored, replenished and replaced constantly. This doesn’t even include the kitchen inventory for hotel restaurants.
The implementation of mobile apps is becoming a common feature of many software solutions, including modern hotel maintenance systems. Nowadays, hotel and resort maintenance software is either offered with a mobile app version or the software itself is completely optimized to support mobile access. Hotel managers can use their mobile devices to communicate with housekeeping and maintenance staff, assign tasks to teams and individual personnel, submit stock/inventory requests, schedule maintenance and process work orders. This makes hotel maintenance systems even more user-friendly and highly efficient. In many cases, mobile accessibility can even be leveraged for customer support purposes.
Hotel maintenance software is designed to help hotel managers and their maintenance staff do their jobs more effectively, especially when it comes to making sure the hotel and all of its facilities are working smoothly. This type of software offers a lot of benefits that any hotel or maintenance manager will appreciate. These are discussed below.
One of the main benefits of implementing the right hotel and resort maintenance software is the faster response time. Hotel maintenance mostly involves tasks that are associated with sanitation, mechanical and electrical faults. Whether it’s a light bulb that needs replacing, a dead battery in one of the TV remotes, an air conditioning system that’s malfunctioning; you need a system that allows you to respond to any maintenance emergency as quickly as possible. A quick response time is one of the highest priorities of any maintenance manager. As soon as an issue arises, maintenance personnel should be up on it immediately. Whatever the problem is it should get resolved without delay, especially when the fault affects guests.
The ability to keep track of all hotel assets greatly benefits not just the hotel manager, but also the maintenance managers and their team members. Hotel maintenance software provides tools designed to make asset tracking much easier and more convenient for maintenance personnel. The software allows teams to get familiar with all the assets, equipment and facilities available in the hotel. It typically has a feature that enables users to add information for each asset, such as the last time the lights where replaced in the lobby or the last technician who worked on the hotel’s HVAC system. This way, the maintenance team will have all the data necessary to effectively manage every facility and equipment in the hotel establishment.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of using a good hotel maintenance system for your hospitality business is the fact that it has all the tools you might need to develop and implement a comprehensive preventive maintenance strategy. Creating an in-depth plan for preventive maintenance and having the ability to automate certain tasks can greatly enhance your maintenance team’s overall productivity and efficiency. When your team is highly efficient in their jobs, it should result in better equipment performance, which can include the HVAC system, water heaters, elevators and power generators. It will also result in having well maintained facilities, clean and fully stocked rooms and a functioning gym.
In addition to having the ability to track and maintain hotel assets, as well as being able to create a robust preventive maintenance plan, hotel maintenance software also allows users to generate reports, analyze relevant data, manage inventory and assign tasks to field maintenance personnel via mobile app, integrations give users the ability to seamlessly integrate their maintenance software with other business process solutions like EAM and CMMS, among others.
Hotel maintenance software allows you to effectively manage your maintenance processes by creating a comprehensive preventive maintenance plan. It also lets you develop a good predictive maintenance process through condition monitoring in order to save on maintenance costs. Hotel maintenance systems are available as a standalone product or as part of a more comprehensive computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) or enterprise asset management (EAM) solution. They can be seamlessly integrated with other third-party applications, such as accounting, inventory management, employee management, maintenance scheduling and collaboration tools. Hotel maintenance software can be deployed in one of two options, the cloud or on-premise.
