District Profile

Location: North Tonawanda, NY
Student Enrollment: Serves over than 3,200 students
Campus Footprint: 3 Elementary Schools (grades K-3), 1 Intermediate School (grades 4 – 6), 1 Middle School (grades 7-8), and 1 High School (grades 9 – 12)

Super User Profile

Name: Jim Hart
Title: Director of Facilities
Tenure: Been with North Tonawanda CSD since April, 2020

Life Before ML Schedules^®

North Tonawanda CSD was using two separate software providers to manage their work orders and their space reservations. NTCSD purchased ML Work Orders first, to help them manage their maintenance and facility requests and tasks. The athletic department was looking for a better way to get athletic schedules out to everyone in a simple and easy to manage way and they weren’t happy with their current solution. So after running with ML Work Orders® for a while, they re-evaluated their scheduling solutions and found that switching to ML Schedules was more cost effective and efficient than their previous solution, especially for their athletic department.

Life with MasterLibrary

ML Schedules and ML Work Orders together.

“Everything is integrated”, explains Jim, “Let’s say you’re an outside organization doing a bake sale for a swim meet. After you fill out your request in ML Schedules, at the bottom it will ask if you need any tables or anything like that and that generates a report to our assigned staff (by building or athletic space) in ML Work Orders.” The benefits between the two systems talking is very tangible. “It frees up more time. It allows you to do other things and not have to worry about losing paper copies or emailing people and reminding people about things that have to be done. You can set up the reminders right in Work Orders and Schedules,” describes Jim.

ML Work Orders

For Jim, ML Work Order’s simplicity and reporting go a long way to help with the day to day management of his facilities. “I Like the color levels tied with priority levels. In our old system, there was nothing to tell the maintenance staff or custodians the priority of work, that this is really important – you need to do this first!” explains Jim. Now it’s easy for his staff to prioritize their day and make sure high priority items are getting done without extra emails or conversations. Jim also leverages the enhanced reporting inside of ML Work Orders. “I do like the reports it generates. I like to pull up the reports to see what is getting done,” says Jim.

Adjusting to COVID-19 Protocols

Like all school districts, NTCSD is adjusting to the new normal and revamping the way they clean and disinfect their buildings. Leveraging ML Work Orders across the district is a big part of their solution.

Cleaning Requests

“Teachers did not have anywhere to go when there was a problem or incident with the sanitization of their room,” explains Jim, “They told their principal or admin staff and it’s not a very efficient way to get things done.” To help expedite and standardize these cleaning requests in the classroom, Jim turned to ML Work Orders. He’s added a new category of requests called “Cleaning” and put a process together for teachers to use ML Work Orders to funnel these requests directly to his maintenance staff. On the flipside, Jim is working with his staff to document when and what was cleaned in the room when they complete a cleaning request. “This will help with quality control,” Jim states, “It will allow me to have more information so that I can monitor and track cleaning requests better. Now if there’s a cleaning request, I can go to the reporting and have all of the information in one place. Once we put in this process, the back and forth between us, the administrators and teachers has really died down”

Inventory Management

Inventory of consumable goods is the next area Jim is seeking to tackle. Inventory is still on paper and they are in the process of adding the ML Work Order’s inventory module. “This year I came into the district and asked ‘What did we buy last year?’,” explains Jim, “No one knew and I got handed a two inch thick stack of paper with the things that the staff wanted and that came out of our supply room. How can you set budgets on inventory when you don’t have any data?” With the inventory module in ML Work Orders, Jim will be able to add items to inventory (including model & product numbers to ensure consistency of ordering), manage reorder threshold levels and alerts when inventory gets low and run reports on inventory spend. This is especially critical during the pandemic when budgets are tight but running out of essential supplies is not an option.

With all of the change that one normally experiences when they start at a new job, compounded with leading their new department through a pandemic, it’s safe to say that Jim has had a more-than-memorable first year at North Tonawanda. “There’s no challenges that can’t be overcome,” Jim states simply. With that mindset, a hard working team at his side and dependable tools and technology, there’s no doubt Jim will continue to forge better processes for sustainably clean, healthy and well-run buildings in his district for years to come.