Papworth Hospital cuts cost of maintenance

World-famous for its pioneering work in heart transplant surgery, Papworth has a vast inventory of life-critical equipment and extensive facilities. Maintaining all these assets with a paper-based, manual system placed a heavy burden on the already over-stretched resources of the Trust’s estates department. The hospital originally used the NHS’s bespoke maintenance management software, WIMS, before creating its own system, but administration costs were still significant and delays of up to three months in producing management reports were unacceptable.

Estates maintenance co-ordinator, Graham Reedman explained: “It was clear that we needed a more robust and efficient system of managing our maintenance schedules, so Shire was asked to undertake a thorough review of Papworth’s maintenance strategy and to recommend a system that would help us to improve productivity and cut administration costs.”

Papworth chose to install the FrontLine Maintenance module as the central building block of its new system. This maintains a comprehensive inventory of assets and equipment and manages PM schedules and corrective maintenance.

The Work Requester, Data Exchange, HandiWorks and HandiReadings modules were added to maximise productivity. Papworth’s maintenance management team can now issue detailed work orders to PDAs (personal digital assistants) carried by their engineers. Engineer’s reports on completed jobs are then returned to the system by simply docking a PDA in a cradle.

The huge delays in processing paperbased reports have been eliminated.

FrontLine enables more accurate and up-to-date monitoring and control of work, and has increased productivity by making better use of the engineers’ time and cutting administration. Reedman also believes that the savings will quickly pay for the relatively low initial investment in the software and PDAs.