Al Scheinpflug, director of facilities operations with WaterStone Bank, has risen through the ranks of his organization to become its director of operations. Along the way, he has handled the evolving maintenance and engineering challenges of 16 facilities in the expanding organization.

In this conversation with Dan Hounsell, senior editor of the facility market, he discusses strategies for tackling the impact of COVID-19, preparations for a new CMMS and his career in facilities management.

Here’s a preview:

DH: What are your top priorities these days?

AS: I started as a facilities coordinator and helped my former boss start to build the maintenance department, and we have never had a CMMS software package to keep track of all of our PMs, our work orders, our assets. We are working real hard to get one approved right now, which will be very beneficial because we've grown over the years, and just in the past year and a half, we added three branches. So it's getting very very challenging for myself and my assistant to keep track of PM schedules and assets. It would help to have a program keep track of that. We do have an in-house-type work order system that was created by our department where employees can fill out a few line items and pull-downs, and then the process automatically sends it to myself or my assistant. Then we can assign it to one of our maintenance techs. But there is no capability in it for me to run reports, to track things, to have a calendar in there for PM schedules, so it is a little bit daunting. It just does not work for what we have to do.

We're already gearing up for the CMMS. Myself, my assistant, my maintenance techs — we're going to create somewhat general inventory-type lists. We're all going to go out and start collecting data for assets. We've been starting to put up room numbers on everything so we can track all the little sub-assets. Every building's got its number, and then from there, we'll break it down by room number so everything within that room number is trackable. It's going to be a very large undertaking.