Episode Summary
In this episode of RecChat our host Zach Malloch is joined by National Sales Manager, Dave Wirtz, and Senior Implementation Consultant, Scott Tipson to discuss MainTrac 3.1, and how it can help manage your maintenance department and integrate with your Recchat Database.
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:28
well, whoa, and we're live and this is kind of weird. Let's try that. There we go. Welcome RecChat everybody to our very special MainTrac edition I am joined by Dave Sird I believe our first sales there's too many Dave's Dave Wirtz. Dave started was just giving those blistering vocals to all of us. And he's actually on chat. He's a MainTrac person. So give him some congratulations if you feel like it. If you don't, oh, no, there is no sound at all. That is very disappointing. We'll come back to that, that consider that a teaser. We'll get back to that at some point, it's probably pretty exciting. I think when I muted my microphone, it also muted my computer audio. Sorry about that. Everybody, we can try that again moment. So that must have been a very interesting introduction. So yeah, you know, we take two weeks off, and then everything goes absolutely crazy. So I am joined by Dave Wirtz, our first sales representative to join us in RecChat, the bravest salesperson, as you can tell. And we're joined by Scott, the main MainTrac man Tipson. And we're gonna talk a little bit about main tracks. So to start things off, what is main tracks?
Scott Tipson 2:11
Well, in a nutshell, MainTrac is a way for you to track your assets, track your resources, it's also a way to track the flow of work orders that are coming in, to manage those. It lets you process inspections, manage inspections. And last, the big thing would be preventative maintenance. So you can put items on a on a time schedule, and every week, month year, they can prompt you with a work order that it's time to do a particular job.
Zach Malloch 2:40
So this would be something maybe for the maintenance department, make sure your Park Department keeps up and running. And yes, it takes care of all those everyday, there's sorts of things that you have to do. That's correct. All right. And so MainTrac, it's been a separate product. But where do we find the main track these days?
Scott Tipson 2:55
Well, currently, if you're on 3.1, you already have access to it. It's just a matter of turning licenses when you purchase the product. And then it's time for us to go in and just create some menus for you to give you the access, and then hold training and you're off and running.
Zach Malloch 3:09
All right, great. Well, you take a quick look at that.
Dave Writz 3:17
Alright, should be pulling up now an example of the MainTrac 3.1 screen and we're sitting actually on a combination log screen, which is where you would track your time and keep a running tally of what you're doing in your organization.
Zach Malloch 3:33
Okay, so looks like we have a couple of kind of major areas that this is broken into. What are we looking at here?
Dave Writz 3:40
So there's a couple moving, as you said, Zack, major areas, there's what call assets, example of assets might be facilities that you work on equipment, trees, and even streets and utilities. Another major part of tasks, tasks are all your work duties, those different things that you do operationally mowing the lawn, or have you ever mop pushing snow, like that. And then the third major building blocks are things we call resources. And resources are really things that cost you money. And visit biggest example of a resource is your labor or your staff costs. So your employees that are in the system. Other resource types might be equipment that's performing work, or materials, or even miscellaneous expense types.
Zach Malloch 4:21
Okay, so we have all of that in there. And since this is a combination log, I'm assuming that it lets you kind of combine all of those pieces together to get a better picture of whatever it is you're trying,
Dave Writz 4:30
You got it. The idea is from one single screen here you can pick if I was to click, for example, an asset like a baseball field. By doing that the right side of the screen now gives me all the different tasks, those work duties that you might perform at that assets base. So maybe something was up with the fence at the baseball field league defense maintenance. And then the third moving part is on the bottom of the screen where we're picking again, the resources in this case it may be just we want to track our labor time so it might be Mr. Anderson here. for that work selecting. And then the last step would just be picking how much time he spent doing that fence maintenance. We log that step four, we've tracked that, and we now have a history to give us that reporting that we're looking at.
Scott Tipson 4:31
One of the nice things about this is you don't have to have a work order for everything. You can pick up the phone and call on your coworker and say, Hey, there's an emergency at the softball field. You know, there's somebody spray painted graffiti on the dugout, last night, there's a game, can you go over and paint it real quick, you know, you don't have to create a work order for everything, I can come to the combination log, like they just explained. And log that time. And then you've got to tracked because it's hitting all those different database tables, which is the asset, the job or task, and then the actual personnel who's performing the work. And on top of that, you can also log the time you spent with your vehicle, maybe driving, or any equipment you use, like Dave mentioned, and the materials, so the paint they use.
Zach Malloch 5:53
Okay, so, so you're talking about work orders. So that would be maybe a more formalized process here.
Scott Tipson 6:00
Yeah, to me, typically, a work order is something that needs to be approved or something or maybe try and track through a smaller period of time. Because we have a reporting where you can take a particular work order and look at all the history on just that particular job, if you will, or work order, and it goes through an approval process to
Zach Malloch 6:17
Okay, so, but that's an optional piece, you don't have to be as complex as that if you wanted to. So what they just did, that could be I walked out, I saw that there was some damage on the fence, I fixed it. And then I go back afterwards for knowing the need for formal approval or then after the fact making a work order, putting it in for approval for something already did exactly in doubling up some of
Scott Tipson 6:38
the work orders more of a management tool of when the work orders should take place when the job should take place. But in order to actually track what you're doing, you still got to log it. So it just doesn't make sense to have somebody go out in the field and perform work and a create a work order after the fact that work is done just like your time. And you're done.
Zach Malloch 6:55
Alright, nice. All right. And so we talked about work orders, we're talking about a little bit about this, but you also mentioned inspections. So tell me a little bit what inspections are like the MainTrac or
Scott Tipson 7:07
Well,
Zach Malloch 7:08
your use case, and then how we use it to it and main track.
Scott Tipson 7:10
Most people have inspection forms, you know, for example, a playground, and they have, you know, maybe 1020 different aspects of a playground that they would inspect at any given time. And this basically lets you just password pass and fail each ticker item for accountability. If something goes wrong, you can kind of track that more report on that you actually did the actual inspection at certain time for liability purposes. And you can customize all of the different results. Some people will be simple and just pass fail. Other people have a more complex system using a series of numbers or letters or whatever it is that they that they have. It's all customizable.
Zach Malloch 7:53
Okay. That's pretty Oh, that's pretty interesting. So what are we looking at here?
Dave Writz 7:57
So the idea with this is you can take that inspection form that Scott referenced, and bring it to a mobile device, or tablet, or in this case, even a phone as long as on the screen now, and interact with that form in the field in real time. So instead of having a piece of paper on a clipboard, where you have these elements of that inspection, and you're tracking the various moving parts, did this slide past in the swings pass? What's the safety surface depth, you do it directly into your phone. And one of the things Scott didn't mention, but is a nice advantage of it, as well as as you then do this on the mobile device and you fail an item, whether it's scored is poor, or it's just a simple fail, it can automatically generate a work order for that item to be fixed.
Zach Malloch 8:42
So the inspection can initiate its own workflows.
Scott Tipson 8:47
And you can also take a photo of the broken piece in question, and that will actually import onto the work order as well. So the person that's looking at the work order to maybe approve can see the actual damage or the issue. Clear.
Zach Malloch 9:00
That's kind of simplifies the thing where I might say, No, that's good to go. And Dave's like, nope, kids will die. Let's fix that. All right.
Scott Tipson 9:08
We don't want anybody dying.
Zach Malloch 9:10
That's a good goal MainTrac keeps people alive. All right. And then, so we talked about some of the recurring things. So inspections have to happen each year, but what other sorts of pieces of this do we track?
Scott Tipson 9:24
Um, so we have a tool called preventative maintenance for those assets that need some kind of maintenance on a schedule. So every week you need to mow a lawn every month, you do a certain building inspection and you want to be reminded because you can't possibly keep track of all these items in your head. And Dave can also explain about you know why it's important.
Dave Writz 9:47
Yeah, one of the big things we talked about with PM's and preventative maintenance when we're trying to sell people listen, get the idea that there's a value is simply put just as a transfer of knowledge. There's so much knowledge typically in an operations team about when things need to happen when things did happen, when's the last time we replaced the roof on that restroom? When's the last time that that air conditioning unit got serviced or got replaced in a building? And oftentimes that information is in the team's head, someone in the organization knows that. Let's go ask Joe. Exactly. Scott knows it. Well, the problem is, is Scott leaves? Where does that information go? So the Pm is a great tool to take that information, get it into the system and put it on this really a schedule more or less of okay, we know that three years ago, the roof was changed in this building. And we know that it had a 15 year lifecycle. So we create a pm for 15 years from now. So once Scott isn't here, 15 years from now, maybe will be but if he isn't, the next man up, that's gonna sit down in Scotts chair has that information to go in and say, okay, when does that roof need to be changed, and that transfer of knowledge that information is brought to the next person.
Scott Tipson 10:53
And the nice thing too, is, you know, when a pm is ready for service, it will automatically create a work order to. And to reset it all you do, as long as the time you spent going whatever job it is. So if you just repair the roof, or you just did a air condition, inspection or maintenance, then it automatically resets itself to the next time interval.
Zach Malloch 11:14
So is this always on time intervals? Or like, let's just say you have a maintenance truck, and you need to get the oil change? We'll help you with that.
Dave Writz 11:20
Yeah, so that's probably the best use case example, if you want to give one to folks that they would understand every three months or 3000 miles, for example, you could be told or main track could tell you, hey, it's time to change oil in that vehicle, or every 10 hours of use on this mower, or 100 miles. It could tell you to sharpen the blades type thing.
Scott Tipson 11:41
When you log, there's a piece that can pop up and basically asking you what is your speedometer reading setup? Because the pm knows that when it gets to 30,000 miles, that is going to trigger that oil change, for example. Right? All right. And it's whatever comes first, whether it's the actual usage or the time,
Zach Malloch 11:57
right, nice, fastest maintenance trucks and trucks in the world. 3000 mile per hours are awesome. And then we're going to go over to assets, we talked a little bit about him, he kind of listed them off pretty quickly. But what are some of the examples that people set up as assets,
Scott Tipson 12:14
most most customers, when they first get main track, they're mostly interested in tracking the facility. So facilities, that type of asset, as well as equipment, trees, streets, and utilities. You know, facilities and equipment are most popular in terms of usage. Trees are becoming more popular because a lot of rec departments are starting to sell Memorial trees. And they want to know what it's costing to maintain these trees over the years. And it's a great tool to use for that.
Zach Malloch 12:45
All right, very nice. And I got a couple other
Scott Tipson 12:50
in a facility isn't necessarily an infrastructure, it can be a trail, it can be a baseball field, it can be really anything. All
Zach Malloch 12:56
right. Dave almost looks like you're about to you want to just show us something there. Or you just
Dave Writz 13:01
Im just pulling up the facility management just to give an example of the list. Okay, we have and I think Scott's point is well spoken, there is no right way to create your facilities. It's what you as an organization, one back from the system in terms of reporting in detail, we can set every single trail up or not, it's really up to you.
Zach Malloch 13:20
Okay. And I noticed that there's a on the right hand side of your screen, there's a RecTrac facility combo key. So I'm assuming because it's in the database, we've got a pretty good integration happening here. Can you talk to that a little bit.
Dave Writz 13:31
Yeah, it is fully integrated. I think that's a key point that that the idea with this is MainTrac. Definitely now with 3.1 really is RecTrac. It's just a module of the system. And in terms of the integration, the key integration points, historically and today are one where if you're scheduling assets, ball fields, gyms, rooms and RecTrac using the facility reservation module, that part of the system can actually pass to MainTrac, the event, and the details of the event in the form of a work order, basically.
Zach Malloch 14:05
So if a maintenance code becomes from your facility reservation,
Dave Writz 14:08
that's kind of the trigger from RecTrac, that maintenance code that you can associate to a reservation is linked to rep to MainTrac, excuse me, and that's kind of step one in the process to initiate the workflow into MainTrac, which then allows you to approve the work order, as Scott said, get a handle on it, have the work actually performed, and then been posting those costs back to the RecTrac side of the house as it were as expensive screen?
Zach Malloch 14:33
Can you go ahead and stop sharing your screen there, Dave will let people see your beautiful faces for a little bit longer. Scott is a movie star in his own right. So we want to give him enough space here as part of the contract to get them onto the screen today. And then we're talking about some of the ways that you can kind of customize MainTrac. So because it's in RecTrac, I know with RecTrac, we can do things like permissions and Access to stuff, we have those same sorts of options and MainTrac to kind of control it.
Scott Tipson 15:05
Yeah, you still have permissions. And you still have the flexibility of having screen designs like you do in RecTrac. Basically, any screen you see can be customized to that person and only see what they need, you don't want to see everything in the system, you know, I might just be a guy who works at the cemetery, well, I only want to see my five assets at the cemetery that I maintained, and I don't really care what's going on at the recreation or facilities. So you can definitely block that stuff out from your view, and then only see the fields you want to see too. So,
Zach Malloch 15:34
okay, so it makes it more pertinent to each person.
Scott Tipson 15:37
Correct.
Zach Malloch 15:37
That is using the system. So I know in some of my experience with doing on site installs, the the guys are out in the parks, they don't really necessarily need to get into computers all the time and learn a whole system. So this kind of simplifies and streamlines everything for everybody.
Dave Writz 15:52
Yeah, I think key to that the fact that it is part of RecTrac doesn't mean that they have to be exposed to all of that RecTrac, kind of inlining what you just said, Zack, the, the maintenance or operation folks can still just see MainTrac elements, they don't have to see all of the moving parts of RecTrac, they don't have to see activity registration. And then within the MainTrac stuff that Scott said that can be very granular as well to just see their pieces. Okay,
Scott Tipson 16:15
it's all based on your menu, you can see what you need, and you don't need to see anything with RecTrac.
Zach Malloch 16:20
All right, very nice. Well, I think those were kind of the major points. And we have a couple of questions coming in if if you guys are ready for that. Sure. All right. And also, if you if you want to stick around to the end, we're going kind of quick, we'll answer as many questions as we can. But we'll try to replay that video with some some actual sound when we get to the end of this. So the first question comes up. Is mobile app part of MainTrac? Is that a separate purchase?
Dave Writz 16:45
Yeah. So it is part of the MainTrac base system now. Okay, so just come you get Maintrac, get your mobile, you get MainTrac, you get mobile. So if you were add the MainTrac module, as it were, you would get the mobile MainTrac element. And just realize I'm not sharing it. But if we do go back to the share, and we can provide screenshots and examples of the mobile's of people who want to see,
Zach Malloch 17:06
okay, yeah, great. We'll put that in the into the follow up document coming up here. And then we had a question about SOT since MainTrac is now part of RecTrac, rather than its own database, has that changed the pricing options at all?
Dave Writz 17:25
Yeah, it does change the pricing to some degree in the sense that you don't necessarily need the system admin module, again, your user licenses that you have, and the whole idea of what Scott had mentioned around the menu, if I'm a RecTrac user, and I need access to MainTrac, and we have user licenses for them already. They don't need additional licenses in the MainTrac aspect. And like I said, then the other big change was the first question is the fact that we're now embedding the mobile piece into, which means you don't have to buy WebTrac to right. You weren't buying there were elements of the WebTrac piece that were added from MainTrac, which are no longer required.
Zach Malloch 17:59
Okay, so Steve, hopefully that helps out. And the question about the cost of Maintrac, right, I'm assuming that that's going to be a conversation based on the size of the department, the parts of it that you want to use.
Dave Writz 18:12
Yeah, there are some variables that will define a final set cost or proposed costs, but we're happy to speak to whomever has interest, we can definitely get that and turn that around to folks really quickly with a really short conversation a couple minutes, and we can definitely get your pricing. Okay,
Zach Malloch 18:28
so just sales@Vermontsystems.com or mail Dave,
Dave Writz 18:32
Davew@Vermontsystems.com. And email me directly if you'd like to send
Scott Tipson 18:36
and any question just on MainTrack in general that maybe you're shy and don't want to ask the question today. Feel free to email me direct at Scott t. So there's three T's there, I'll spell my first name with three t. That's my last initial at Vermont systems.com. I'm glad to call and discuss anything you want. It's all
Zach Malloch 18:53
Very nice. All right. And we're asking we have somebody asking about the call center or the service processing for there was a question about some resident addresses. Where we go, can you incorporate resident addresses for the RecTrac facility combo key field. So I guess to do maintenance on a particular address in the system, like somebody calls up, you look up and you see that maybe part of the municipal departments. Maybe there's a telephone pole right in front,
Dave Writz 19:24
I would want to check the Verify. But there is an address table in RecTrac as you're well aware that address table has to be populated with data. So you either have to build your addresses manually or do some type of import to create that haven't checked if the call center is utilizing that particular table. But it does exist in the database. There is an ability to have an address listing. We can definitely check who that question is for and get that actually.
Zach Malloch 19:51
Andrew Tipper another one of our quality assurance people for MainTrac says that it does use households. So
Dave Writz 19:56
the fact that he uses households and going to be very confident saying can use that address table and great.
Zach Malloch 20:03
And then looks like there's a couple of questions about a little bit more of the work or pieces. First one is do we have a work order request screen, I'm guessing that they're asking if we could see what that work order request screen looks like. And then possibly tied into that is, are their supervisory approval processes or customizable approval processes for those record
Scott Tipson 20:25
while Dave, while Dave's kind of getting the screen ready. Basically, you can create the main work order screen to be as simplified as possible, where you can just have the Add button. And that's it for allowing people to add and then just view the work orders that are actually in the system without actually being able to manipulate them. That's all done through your screen design.
Zach Malloch 20:45
Okay, so you could potentially have add, edit, delete. ,
Scott Tipson 20:49
Yeah exactly. I, yeah, I mean, there's different degrees of rights people have. Not everybody needs full access. So you can just give them the screen without any buttons so that people can look at them. But for people that just need to add, you would just have one button, and that's all they would have access to
Zach Malloch 21:07
share. Yeah, lets go ahead and share.
Dave Writz 21:08
And I was giving the share a mobile example of this. So again, I'm on the mobile device. And I'll give you a reference point to this. There is a work order processing option, for example, which is a screen design that's built around more functionality. Think of a manager, I need to be able to go into approval work order or reject a work order or assign a work order, give it a due date, things of that nature. The work order request form, which I had, when I first shared, it's the one that I had pulled up is the ability to simply just create a work order. And then the fields that are defined on this screen, again, are user defined. So how much of this information? Do you need a phone number? That's the first question to ask if you said no, I don't need a phone number for this request D, you would remove the field. So you can make the form like Scott said, really to your liking in terms of what information you want to capture from the request D. Obviously, the idea with this then is there are different statuses for work orders, Scott head said new reviewed, approved, and as new work orders would be from the request, Scott is my manager might see that in his inbox, he would pull up the management form and then do his approval thing.
Scott Tipson 22:25
Go for it. And one of the nice features with the work order approval, you can actually have automatic emails sent to a requester or someone who signs a work order based on the status change. So if I'm a requester, every time a work order goes to approved or in progress or complete, even rejected, that person will automatically be notified of that change. So they're always kept in the loop of the work order. And it's basically its lifecycle.
Zach Malloch 22:50
So I'm curious about that part. Yeah, I'm we we had a Dave Sird chimed in and said that we have a call center service processing. So I'm guessing that's to get requests from the public to come out and do something then hold that loose or whatever. And could they be a requester? That's copied on those emails, exactly. Just automatically get updated when the department's working through
Scott Tipson 23:09
as long as their emails in the system? And then they will be notified as long as you give them access to do that. Yes.
Dave Writz 23:14
And they're linked to the work order. Question.
Zach Malloch 23:17
Okay, transparency in government. Alright, and then service request processing? 3.1? That's not really a question. Andrew, could you give me slightly more detail? Oh, that's the name of it. It's just service request processing, not in the call center.
Scott Tipson 23:34
For those of you that might have a little bit of knowledge of 10.2. It was called Call Center processing and 10.2. So we changed the name to service request processing, in 3.1. So just so people are like, What's this on? It might be on the old legacy version, when or why they can't find it. It's really call center processing.
Zach Malloch 23:50
Okay, great. Well, let's see might have another question or two here. Yeah. So there's a question about email notify options so that managers notified we answered that that is definitely the case. And are these features only available in hosted or if you have the database on your servers, I'm assuming
Dave Writz 24:12
they're available for both environments. So whether you're on premise, or whether you are hosted. And that's actually something now that we can do with MainTrac, previous versions of MainTrac didn't have the hosted opportunity. So now could be hosted for sure. But definitely, these are available for both on premise.
Zach Malloch 24:28
And that brings up another question for me then. So let's say somebody had MainTrac, and they're still in 10.2. And they upgraded direct track last year, so then, presumably, they'd have to keep their Maintrac database where it was, but now, if they wanted to upgrade that, can they integrate it now?
Scott Tipson 24:45
Yes, you can. So basically attend to we have a series of D or data files get exported, and then we run a utility through RecTrac 3.1 That actually imports all those and populates the MainTrac really added database tables,
Zach Malloch 25:01
okay, now, so compared to I think most of the people here are pretty familiar with a RecTrac installation or RecTrac upgrade process, how does that compare to a MainTrac upgrade process,
Scott Tipson 25:12
not nearly as intensive, you know, from my experience a new installs, you know, four days, we can cover pretty much everything. You know, I've learned a lot over the years of doing a lot of installs and what works and what doesn't. And I want to say, you know, back in the day, when I was new, we were trying to get everything in the system and, and way too much detail would be implemented. And I tried to get people to just go slow, you don't have to use the old system in after day one, you know, it can grow with you. So I think it's important to just go slow, learn to just maybe log some stuff. And then everybody's comfortable logging. Let now let's log work orders, and let's create work orders. And then you can throw inspections in. And then before you know it, everybody's using the full system, but you just do it in small groups. It just seems to be to me anyway, what works the best I could be wrong, everybody has a different level of learning. So it's really depends on the customer early, and how ambitious they are. Open ended question, I guess. So it was a little different.
Dave Writz 26:14
And I think for the migration piece of that, it's also a significantly smaller ass than a RecTrac migration, the migration to from if you're already on MainTrac 10.2 and you want it to move to MainTrac 3.1 We definitely have a from just the sales side, a significantly less amount of training that we quote, you know, you might have been quoted five days for a RecTrac migration, you might get one or two for a MainTrac, and we have a good chance we might even do it remotely. So significantly less,
Scott Tipson 26:51
Depending on you know, what the goal is for the customer migration is typically can be done over the phone. But if you have a lot of people to train, a lot of people will go on some, you know, requests to go on site for that. The other thing too, that I've done in the past is for people that want to migrate is done in the actual demo environment, and let people play around with it for a month, two months until everybody's comfortable. And then we'll do another live migration, you know, in the future. And then it's not as much of a shock to all those users, you know,
Zach Malloch 27:16
So it's not as much shock configuration.
Scott Tipson 27:18
Exactly. Yeah,
Zach Malloch 27:19
Like in a RecTrac migration.
Scott Tipson 27:20
Yeah, and some of the stuff that you configure in a demo, we can ask for, like, you know, screen designs and devise our excuse me profiles, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel when you go live.
Zach Malloch 27:30
Great. Okay, well, I think we, we answered all the questions. So we will give it another minute or two. Is there any final closing remarks either of you guys have?
Dave Writz 27:42
Say if you're interested, we're happy to talk with him. He said earlier. Call Scott or the sales team we're happy to
Zach Malloch 27:49
and actually, speaking of that, if Laurie is still on the line, I believe Scott's been trying to get in touch with you about your MainTrac.
Scott Tipson 27:56
I've been hounding people to get get me on a schedule to get going. All right, we're just given her time Laurie.
Zach Malloch 28:02
Okay. Well, let's, let's see if I can get a little bit of a music video going here. And we'll see if we can end on that note. Just give me one moment to find it. You guys can fill in the gap here with your playful banter, playful banter. That's exactly what we're looking for. Okay, so get this queued up. Right about there is when the music starts, we'll go ahead and make that possible screen and go to zoom. I'm going to share that window with all of these lucky people.
Dave Writz 28:41
Thanks, everyone.
Scott Tipson 28:42
Thanks for your time, everyone.
Zach Malloch 28:44
And here we go. All right, and that is our episode of RecChat. Thank you so much for joining us for the first RecChat of 2019 2020. That's it. And We will talk to you all very shortly. See you later.