Dealing with water damage is stressful at the best of times, mostly because of the tight deadlines that come with a type of damage that actually gets worse as it sits. There’s an incentive to rush to action when dealing with water damage, to make sure to get started as quickly as possible, and to focus on organization after the job’s already started.
The problem is that when you rush to start work, simple organizational tasks get left behind – and that can have bigger consequences than you might imagine. One big issue is keeping track of drying equipment, especially expensive pieces like dehumidifiers and high-capacity pumps.
It might not seem possible to leave such large, valuable units just lying around, but RocketPlan founder Joe Tolzmann knows just how hectic things can get on a jobsite when workers are pressed for time.
Tolzmann remembers a situation where, six months after the end of a water damage restoration job, he received a call from the property owner complaining about a bunch of industrial dehumidifiers they’d left behind.
When they went to retrieve the equipment, they found that they had left more than $6000 worth of drying equipment. Worse, had the property owner not called to complain, they likely would never have found the missing units.
One thing you can do to implement better tracking of equipment is a named sign-out system, which makes each worker associated with equipment personally responsible for keeping track of it. When people know that they will be personally associated with a mistake, and potentially liable for replacement fees, they become much more aware of their actions.
Another easy, though costly, solution is to install small GPS trackers on your largest and most valuable tools; this makes them easy to find in the future, but it does add to the cost of your operation and creates the need to occasionally charge the trackers themselves.
As with so many solutions to business woes, these techniques can work but, arguably, create as much hassle as they eliminate.
RocketPlan offers a unified project management platform for the restoration industry, and that includes keeping track of equipment. Your project hub collects all relevant information about a jobsite, including notes about things like equipment left on location. By splitting each property into individual rooms, you even know where to look within a large property.
By using the cloud to stay coordinated, project managers, technicians, and insurance adjusters can all see everything they need to see – all in one place.
That makes it much harder to forget things, since most of the actual organization is done for you. Just use the RocketPlan app as your repository for work information and that information will remain available, and organized, forever. No need to duplicate effort or wonder whether another worker remembered to make a particular note; if you can’t find a piece of information on the appropriate RocketPlan project page, that’s probably there’s no information to find.
An organized workplace can be hard to achieve even in a static office, let alone when a company’s workers are constantly moving around an entire city. The solution is to embrace a unifying structure to how your business operations, so everyone knows all the most vital pieces of information and all your jobs can stay on track all the way to final payment.
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