Mercy Hospital

About the client

Mercy Hospital is a private, not-for-profit surgical hospital in Dunedin, New Zealand. With 6 operating theatres and 80 beds on site, surgeons elect to work with Mercy to utilise their exceptional facilities and care teams.

Mercy Hospital’s FM team are tasked with keeping the cutting-edge facilities at peak performance for both surgeons and patients. Theatres are optimised for surgeons to create the best possible outcomes, and rooms designed to facilitate patient recovery.

The opportunity

Mercy prides itself on constantly improving the way they do things, ensuring they stay ahead of the game and are working efficiently. The hospital had utilised the BEIMS Facilities Management system for many years, and while it was supporting their operations, they knew that a move to the next generation of facilities management solutions was necessary to maintain this commitment to continual improvement.

Robert Larsen, who heads up facilities management at Mercy Hospital, explained “for us, it was a no brainer, it makes more sense to shift to a cloud system that the team can access from anywhere, on any device.”

The journey

In late November 2022, Mercy committed to the move to cloud, and with the support of the FMI team, commenced a project to transition their facilities operations from BEIMS to FMI. Working with the same team they’d trusted for years, Mercy were provided a clear pathway and support to achieve a seamless migration.

Facilities manager Robert explains “It was really easy, the team were on board straight away, and were in constant communication. They gave me a clear picture of how they’d done other migrations, and I knew exactly what I needed to do throughout the process. They have been really supportive and always there, even with the time difference my emails were always responded to within a day, which is unheard of.”

“I also have to acknowledge the support team behind them, they’re so knowledgeable, pick things up straight away and get to the root cause of any problems.”

Operating with a lean team, Mercy were able to rely on the FMI migration team to shift their data from BEIMS to FMI. “Our data was provided to us, and all we had to do was go over and make sure it was correct. That was a challenge as a lean team, but we still managed to get all our data into the new system, and have it useable, in about 8 weeks” says Robert.  

With change management in mind, Mercy opted for a staged approach to rolling the system out beyond the FM team. This still resulted in over 40% of staff using the system within a few weeks.

“The uptake has been really good, and staff are finding it far easier to log jobs now. They love being able to log a job on their phone and attach photos to requests. The detail on the requests we’ve been receiving has dramatically improved as well. The template for requests requires users to provide a location and description, and giving them the ability to attach photos to requests has cut the back and forth right down” says Robert.

Improving the visibility over job progress has helped to foster a greater understanding between the FM team and facility users. Requesters are able to see the progress of their job, and can better understand the steps required to resolve a request.

While previously, the requester may have had no contact whatsoever with the person performing the work, there’s now an active feedback loop. This increased connection and collaboration is already starting to uncover new opportunities for efficiencies in Mercy’s facilities.

Looking to the future

In the immediate future, Mercy will be continuing to refine processes and data, to ensure the FMI solution is working as efficiently as possible for them.

Planned maintenance is high on the agenda for the facilities team, with Robert explaining “planned and preventive maintenance are our bread and butter, we want to make sure we’re extremely accurate there. The goal is to not have any downtime, we don’t want to close a theatre for a day and lose all that revenue.”

“With FMI Works, planned and preventive maintenance have gone from being something that’s quite difficult, to being really simple. We can bundle things together that need the same work at the same time, for example, things like HVAC systems that need the same inspection schedule.”

As a medical facility, Mercy undergoes frequent auditing, to align with council compliance requirements and retain medical certification. With FMI, the goal is to have all the information required for audit at the click of a button.

“Reporting in FMI is just so much easier, we can generate standard reports to come out monthly, and we don’t have to spend time searching for information. Auditors too, don’t want to be sitting there while you fish through your files, they want data on demand” explains Robert.

Mercy is set to be completely paperless, with the system offering a single source of truth, and single point of access. Longer term, this asset data is set to be used more broadly than the FM team, with the IT and Finance teams to benefit from the data contained in the platform.

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