Preventive Maintenance and Toro’s My Turf System

When I attended college at Lake City Community College (Florida Gateway College now) in 1998 we were heavily pushed to understand the effects of doing preventive maintenance. During that time we are soaking in so much information in a short amount of time that there were certain subjects the instructors went over time and time again and one of those subjects was Preventive Maintenance and it’s importance.

When I left college there were 2 main things I wanted to develop my career around one was cutting units and the other was proper preventive maintenance. Over the years I have used many types of systems. During my internship my boss was using index cards which was an effective way to keep up with the information. As I took on my own position in Boca Raton, Florida I started utilizing folders where I printed off a sheet for every piece of equipment and wrote parts and such in as we repaired it or did services to it. I then moved to Naples, FL where I then began working on building an excel spreadsheet program that was managed by dates along with my folders on each piece of equipment. I also utilized this same system in Georgia while I was there. When I made the move to The Ritz-Carlton I decided at a new property I wanted to have a nice system to use and did a lot of research where I found and utilized Trims over the last 6 years. Trims does a great job the only issue is the time it takes to implement all the data and then walk around to all the equipment every few weeks to collect the hours all of which is time consuming. The strongest part of Trims in my opinion is the budget management part where I can record my invoices and effectively manage my budget.

Now that you have some background on the different things I have used on preventive maintenance I would like to discuss our newest system Toro’s My Turf program. A few years ago I was lucky enough to be asked to be apart of the beta team for this new system. I was using it off and on through the trials and it worked ok but being a browser based system the speed of the program is based on the speed of your internet. So it was really taking me a lot of time to go from one screen to another to input the data. Recently I decided to give it another run and see what new things they had implemented to find out that they have really cut down on page load time by consolidating some of the windows you had to open and close to get a work order done. Which was very impressive. I think however the most impressive has been the introduction of the wireless hour meter. If you need a time saver this thing does it. In fact it works so well we ordered it for our entire fleet and are looking at the possibility of using it at other parts of the resort. It is great to be able to focus more time on the work and less time on the data collection.

The system itself works good I still think their are some opportunities to speed things up a bit but overall I really like where it is headed. My critique on the systems is that I would really like to see a place in there to do invoice tracking and budget management. The biggest reason for me is that I still use Trims to track my budget info while using My Turf on maintenance so if I could do everything from one place I would give it an A however for now a solid B certainly puts it at the top of PM systems to use with efficiency being the all star.