by Phoebe Roe

Walk into a first-year dorm and you will see a fairly standard assortment of wooden doors to mostly double rooms. What do Kenyon’s maintenance workers see? Work orders. 

“Our old work order system was 12-15 years old, just outdated technology,” Facility Logistics Manager Clint Baker said.  “We couldn’t extract the data from it that we wanted.”

Thus, nearly two years ago, Kenyon administrators began to work with the software company WebTMA as part of Kenyon’s Middle Path Partnership project, and purchased a web-based program to begin implementation of a new work order system.  

On Aug. 1, 2013, Baker came to Kenyon to begin to prepare the system for its release in the summer of 2014.  To do so, he spent hours walking through Kenyon’s 157 buildings and cataloging the correct room numbers and locations of the more than 4,200 rooms around campus.  

“If it has a roof and electricity in it, then it has maintenance needs,” Baker said.  

Since the new work order system has been accessible to students, over 1,300 work orders have been requested, equaling nearly 200 per week.  

There have been a few glitches since the system’s debut. Most recently, the program was missing some bathrooms in the Kenyon Athletic Center but, as Baker said, “any implementation this size is going to have its bumps in the road.”

Student responses to the new system will trickle in as the year progresses, culminating in the work order system’s first great challenge: winter in Ohio.