UpKeep

Crucial Team Management

This creates the foundation for extensive maintenance records, historical tracking of problems, inventory, and more. It allows you to monitor your entire portfolio on a macro and micro level.

Perfect CMMS for my Needs

Using Upkeep has been an easy process, and it helps keep everything in one place. I also like the fact that our Operations Manager sees everything that I do, from creation of work orders, to updates, and completion of work orders.

Why UpKeep Is The Best

Work orders works well on mobile app.

We began using Upkeep in 2021 at the start up of our new company. Our asset list includes over 300 units, 165 of them needing regular preventative maintenance. From the beginning, the approximate monthly user license fee near $100 seemed high, but not for a system that was sold to us as an all-encompassing platform. As it turns out, Upkeep fell far short of that level. We began using Upkeep prior to the preventative maintenance module roll out they use now, and right away we found that recurring work orders were not populating correctly, most notably re-using work order numbers (which should be unique), and not populating at the correct time. This was mostly solved when the PM roll out took place in 2022, but the amount of labor time on our end to correct this recurring work order problem was excessive to say the least. Tech support was very limited, in that they were only able to train in how to use the new module. It didn’t help that when they migrated away from recurring work orders to PM, the functionality ceased on all our existing work orders. Many of our assets had several months of missed maintenance due to this as we frantically tried to catch up. The PM module still took over a year to establish a working capability, with many bugs found and long delays for fixes. The work order function still worked very well, especially for the technicians using the mobile app. Aside from always requiring an internet connection. It took some time, but we were able to manipulate the software to sort work orders correctly. Purchase orders and parts brought around a host of new problems. The first, and most noteworthy, is that our accounting department, who only required viewing of PO’s that are in the system, required an administrator’s license. This took one of the very expensive licenses away from a technician for a user that didn’t need full unfettered access. In addition, there were no custom security variations that wouldn’t require a full license to simply view purchase order data. Regarding purchasing, inventory control and cost appropriations, it is important to note that to change the pricing of an individual item in Upkeep, one must update the part in their parts/inventory module. There is no function in a working PO that allows for updating of current price. This has two problems. First, as prices fluctuate from vendor to vendor and day to day, an updated last cost is very important. Second, when updating the price in Upkeep’s Parts module, the cost would update all work and purchase orders from the past, thereby adjusting overall costs of every PO, some of which were not due, and making them no longer match invoices to be paid. This also brings up a purchasing question that if costs are not available to be averaged, then a buyer cannot accurately predict and anticipate cost increases and make bottom line dollar saving decisions. Among these issues with parts and POs was the fact that vendor assignments are a secondary thought, taking a distant 6th position to “PO Title”, “Description”, and “Category” among other less important references. These problems truly spoke of a company and designers that had never used a proper purchase order or items/parts inventory control system. These concerns were not rectified by the time we changed software in August 2023. I don’t want to sound completely disparaged by Upkeep. Like I said before, the work order mobile app is very easy to use, and the learning curve is very shallow. Tech support always left something to be desired as well as we were presented with “workarounds” rather than solutions on a regular basis. Our annual “check-in” was with our original salesman, who was more interested in the analytics of how we paid our bill than how the software worked. When said salesman left the company, it took nearly three months to get a new account representative. When we upgraded this year to another company (which will not be named) we got all the features of Upkeep and so much more, for half the price. I wish all the best to Upkeep and all their employees, but I would not recommend this software.

A Great Maintenance Management Solution