Customers
Community transit focuses on maximizing use of Bigfoot CMMS.
Not many Bigfoot CMMS customers are charged with maintaining bus stops, but Community Transit of Everett, WA, probably has lots of company when it comes to wanting to maximize its use of Bigfoot's functionality. How this transportation agency is going about finding ways to do that should be of interest to just about anyone.
Community Transit (CT) is the transportation agency for all of Snohomish County, just northeast of Seattle. It's CT's job to maintain all of 2,600 bus stops, 220 shelters and park-and-ride facilities in the system, as well as the infrastructure of three maintenance shops for the county's buses.
When Mike Warren, Facilities Manager, realized CT needed help in automating its maintenance operation more effectively, he brought in Rick Rickman to assess the agency's use of Bigfoot and confirm that it would see them well into the future. Rickman has a consulting engineering background and had worked with and evaluated a number of computerized maintenance management systems (CMMSs), from high-powered enterprise systems to very basic software. He believes that what's important is how dynamic the program is in its features, reports and usability within a company's specific needs.
Rickman quickly determined that Bigfoot was a winner…but that CT was not yet taking advantage of Bigfoot's full functionality. Both Warren and Rickman wanted to explore the software's reporting and inventory capabilities; they also wanted to standardize how Bigfoot was used throughout the department.
As Assistant Facilities Manager, Rickman formed a team that included the leaders and senior technicians of the base group, responsible for facilities at headquarters, and the road group, which handles all of the shelters and bus stops. Together, they have been reviewing how the software is currently used and correcting problems, such as standardizing codes and tables in order to populate the system uniformly and produce useful productivity and other reports. CT is also now beginning to use Bigfoot for inventory management.
"I like the combination of flexibility and simplicity," says Rickman. "Our business is a bit of a hybrid. Bigfoot has the flexibility we need to address the types of facilities we're dealing with." In fact, Rickman is working with other transit agencies on the West Coast on customizing and standardizing CMMS software specifically for transit agencies.
As for simplicity, both Rickman and Warren appreciate the fact that Bigfoot's intuitive ease of use means all 20 people in the shop have learned how to use the software and have open access to it whenever needed.
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