For all those recurring activities that keep your property healthy and humming, use preventive maintenance to schedule your work and keep you on task.
- The preventive maintenance tab
- Making schedules
- Interactive steps
- Tasks
- Add Service Request from Preventative Maintenance task
- Notification settings
The preventive maintenance tab
Preventative maintenance is broken into tasks and schedules. Tasks are automatically generated from your schedules—these are the action items you need to do regularly, according to the schedule.
You can add filters to narrow your search of a task or schedule, or you can click edit columns to choose what displays on the table.
To download a record of your tasks or schedules, just click export CSV to generate a file of your currently sorted view.
Making schedules
To make a schedule, click the add schedule button. Fill out your details, assign the task to a team or person, add the estimated completion time.
| đź’ˇ You can set recurring tasks for things without equipment, too, like building inspections. |
Next, set your schedule. Choose how often the task repeats and enter a first due date. Schedules will automatically generate your tasks, so choose how many days in advance you want the schedule to create your tasks. Lastly, choose when you want the schedule to end—including never.
You can also link specific equipment to the schedule, if it's relevant. Select link equipment, then click the + add equipment button. Make your selections—all of your task information will now go that equipment profile as a historical record.
Toggle Task Expiration to automatically set the task to 'Expired Status' after a task has not been completed per it's set recurrence. (For example, a monthly task will expire one month after due, a weekly task will expire one week after the due date, etc.)
Lastly, you can add interactive steps for tasks with multiple action items—we'll cover it in the next section.
Interactive steps
Interactive steps are like a customizable checklist for your tasks. To add steps to a schedule, click + add steps at the bottom of the schedule settings.
Here's everything you can add to your steps:
- Instruction: Use this open text field to add explicit instructions or reminders for tasks that aren't completed as often.
- Acknowledge: Add a specific task or reminder with a checkmark to make sure important items aren't missed or forgotten.
- Open response: pose quick questions for people to answer or review on the spot. You can make responses, short, long, or numerical.
- Multiple choice: create multiple choice questions or prompts—the response can be single or multiple.
- Meter reading: have someone complete a meter reading based on parameters for the linked equipment.
You can add as many steps as you like—drag and drop at the left to rearrange the order or click the trashcan icon to delete steps you don't need.
Tasks
Activate will automatically create tasks based on your schedule settings. Anyone assigned to the task can click into the details page, find the information they need, leave notes, add attachments, and change the status of the task according to your organization's workflows. On the steps panel you can complete the task's specific checklist. To log your hours on the task or add more context, use the hours & notes panel.
Tasks aggregate on the tasks panel in preventive maintenance and, when you link them, they show up on equipment profiles too. You can always export any specific task as a PDF.
Add Service Request from Preventative Maintenance task
You can add a service request to an existing preventative maintenance task, for example, to request a repair on a faulty piece of machinery or to add a one-time task to a recurring preventative maintenance schedule.
To add, navigate to the Admin portal, then to Work Orders, then to Preventative Maintenance. Locate the specific task, and open it to view the task details.
Under Actions, select Generate Service Request. This will open a service request form, where you can submit your details and information per your service request form configuration.
You will see a notification that the request has been sent, and can view it in the Service Requests section of the admin portal. The request will then be added as a link on the task details page under "Linked service request(s)".
Notification Settings
VTS Activate also lets you set up notifications for preventative maintenance, which can alert admins, notify users that they have a new task, or when a task is updated. You can use pre-set notifications, or create your own. To locate the Notification settings, click Settings from the Preventative maintenance page.
Once in the settings tab, you can modify existing default notifications to suit your preferences, or create entirely new ones from scratch by clicking Add Notification.
Available Default Notifications:
When a task is created send an email to the view all admins
When a task is created send an email to the assigned team or user
When a task is assigned send an email to the assigned team or user
When a task status is updated send an email to the assigned team or user
When a task is updated send an email to the assigned team or user
When a tasks is unassigned send an email to the view all admins
When a task is unassigned send an email to the assigned team or user
Add or Edit Default notifications
Click Edit below a pre-set notification to view and edit the settings, or click Add notification to create an entirely new setting. You will be able to change parts of each condition and outcome, and rename the workflow. Click More actions to either duplicate or delete the workflow. Once you have updated your workflow conditions and outcomes, click Save to finish.
Conditions
All conditions will start with "When a task".
Select the following from the dropdown: is created, is updated, status is updated, is assigned, is unassigned
Outcome
Use the dropdown to select what will happen when the conditions are met. Use the dropdown to select from: send a push notification, send an email, send an email and a push notification
Select who will receive the notification. Use the dropdown to select from: to the view all admins, to the assigned team or user, or to a specific team
Name the workflow if desired, and click Save to finish.