It wasn’t the use of technology alone that led us to our success – it was also having a well defined workflow that everyone from the back office to the front lines understood and followed. Are you ready to take a closer look at your own workflow?

We’ve all had a project that starts out well but somewhere around three-quarters of the way through things start falling apart. We spoke with Lana Whitehead, a community manager at MSI, LLC about how she keeps clear communication with her vendors.

If you could read the minds of your vendors, would you want to? Sometimes it’s a love/hate relationship.

We talked with a vendor to hear her perspective on working with property managers. KC Brown is the owner of KC Land Designs but has been an account manager for 20 years as a vendor.

Here are some of her concerns when working with property management companies.

The task of collecting the correct documentation and generating reports for client review regarding services completed can be daunting. I've found creating a documented standard operating procedure for field crews is a valuable solution.

It might be tempting to think that getting your service crews to start documenting their services completed with photos is easy. In theory that may be true but in practice I've found quite the opposite. You would be surprised how important spelling out the precise the requirements for photos can be. Good photos are essential to customer satisfaction and when it comes to liability the importance of photo standards is all the more critical.

You might think that there is no way to protect yourself from too much or too little snow but there is a way to manage that risk. Just like a farmer buys crop insurance, a business can buy insurance to protect their business from either too much or too little snow.

To minimize your risk of lawsuits, it is not enough to have a reliable snow removal crew that does a good job. You can have the crew perform the work to the letter of the law and the contract and you can still have a slip and fall lawsuit brought against all parties involved with the property.

To protect against slip and fall lawsuits you need to document all aspects of your snow removal operations.

The very nature of property management, where people and properties are often located far apart, creates a unique set of challenges to managing your time effectively. FieldVision was created to help property managers save time by eliminating the big time wasters. Learn how to address the top 5 biggest time wasters.

So, you’re sitting at your desk on a fine summer day enjoying your coffee when you get a package delivered to you. You open the package and inside is a complaint letter from the Law Offices of “We’ve Got You Now”. The letter states that due to the negligence of the property owner, property manager and the snow removal contractor, their client slipped and fell on a sidewalk last November. As a result of the fall, their client has medical expenses, lost wages and pain and suffering in the amount of $150,000. The attorney demands that their client be compensated….Your heart sinks and you could just scream… This happened 9 months ago (or maybe even a year and 9 months ago), why am I hearing about it now? Does anyone remember that storm, do we have good records and if so can we even find the records?

If you are a small to medium sized property management firm you’ve probably run into the national firms coming into your territory and stealing your clients. If you’re business focuses on the multi-site commercial clients you’re feeling the heat even more. The national firms have an impressive array of technology that they claim will allow them to better manage contractors, keep better records, provide better management reporting, and generally improve the whole communication process and work flow from the client to the property manager to the field service teams.

The life of a property manager can be tough. You’re probably managing several properties that span a whole city, a state or even multiple states. This means that you can’t see all of your properties every day. In fact you’re probably lucky to see all of your properties once a month or less. You need work to get done on your properties but can’t be there every time the janitors or grounds crews show up. So you line up your vendors, explain the scope of work to them and trust that they’ll do everything their required to do.

Ask yourself this one question; if my customer fired me today, would they lose something unique that my competitor could not give them. If the answer is no (and it probably is), your service is a commodity and that’s not good.

FieldVision by DTSI is a mobile application designed for property managers and field service providers to solve the problems that each face every day in the course of their work. Property owners and managers need a way to track and verify that the field service crews are performing the work required and that the work was done well. Crews that go out into the field to perform work need a means of tracking that work and also proving to the client that the work has been done satisfactorily.