It could be said that scheduled maintenance keeps
the world humming. Take commercial airplanes for example, maintenance schedules
on each part inside an airplane are carefully kept, and when any part is near
the end of its lifetime, that part is replaced before it breaks. This sort of meticulous
maintenance tracking is a big part of what keeps airplanes in the air and
passengers safe.
But what if we could do this inside a home? What if
we could track the parts inside our refrigerators, our washers and dryers or
even the squeaky hinges on our bathroom doors? For property managers, who
oversee hundreds or thousands of rental units at a time, the data needed to
inform scheduled maintenance could be immensely valuable. For residents and
homeowners, it could save the frustration of coming home to a broken appliance,
like a defrosted freezer dripping water across a kitchen floor.
Here is where Property Meld comes in. The company hosts
web-based maintenance software for property managers that provides complete
oversight of the entire maintenance process, from a ticket submission for that
broken refrigerator to follow up after the new unit is installed. In essence,
Property Meld makes it easier for residents to have maintenance concerns
addressed promptly while saving landlords headaches and money at the same time.
Property Meld sponsored a year-long research project
undertaken by three computer science students at South Dakota Mines in an effort to inform new
models for scheduled maintenance on homes and apartments. The students, Cody Hall,
Rachel Terwilliger and Sharvil Pai Raiker, spent their senior year taking a
deep dive into the data on how often stuff breaks.
The team used maintenance data and invoices,
generated by Property Meld’s services to clients, to form a granular
understanding of the time and money spent when fixing in-home assets across
thousands of rental units. The team then built software to interpret the
invoices and extract useful information that can inform rental maintenance
scheduling.
“This project is the
groundwork for helping out renters and homeowners from the pain of maintenance
on homes,” says Hall. “The invoices have valuable data that can be used to gain
a better understanding of the assets in the home. With that better
understanding, we can then have preventative maintenance meaning maintenance
that happens before those assets break and the home is damaged or destroyed.”
For Property Meld, this research is not
necessarily about making immediate profits for the company. Rather, it’s
fulfilling a vision for the future. “It is important to emphasize that the
benefits are primarily long-term in nature and encompass a wide range of areas,”
says Terwilliger.
The company, based in Rapid City, S.D., also
finds value in partnering with students at South Dakota Mines.
“By engaging in this collaboration, we have
been able to nurture potential moonshot ideas, offer valuable mentoring and
growth opportunities, develop proof of concepts that could evolve into
real-world features and lay the groundwork for exploration in new areas,” says Austin
Wentz, an engineering manager at Property Meld and a mentor for the student
team.
For Sharvil Pai Raiker, one of the students on the project,
working with experienced software engineers at Property Meld was
invaluable.
"Austin played a pivotal role in the resounding
success of the project, says Pai Raiker.
“His invaluable guidance and expertise enabled our team to make well-informed
decisions, ensuring the project's seamless completion. His profound impact on
my professional growth has honed my engineering acumen and workplace aptitude,
leaving a lasting impression on my career trajectory."
Pai Raiker and other students on the
team also drew inspiration as pioneers of industry game-changing software.
“I think this project will open doors for Property Meld in how they
gather their data and generate future product ideas,” Terwilliger says. “Property
Meld has an opportunity to be the first one to offer something brand new that
vendors haven’t seen before. Even though Property Meld is geared toward
property management companies, this project leans into business analytics for
the vendor side of the company. The ability to affect many businesses with more
useful information to guide is a big deal.”
Raiker, Terwilliger and Hall also had the benefit of internship
experiences at Property Meld while going to school. Following
graduation, Raiker accepted a full-time position at another South Dakota based
software company, Omnitech. Both Terwilliger and
Hall accepted full-time positions as associate software engineers at Property
Meld. For Wentz, the opportunity to sponsor this student design team also
helped his company land two experienced programmers in this highly competitive
labor market.
“At Property Meld, we are
deeply committed to giving back to our community and fostering a culture of
philanthropy within our organization. We believe that investing in the next
generation of STEM professionals is not only a social responsibility but also a
crucial component of our long-term success and sustainability,” Wentz says.
Mines Department
of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) is finishing the annual
round of soliciting senior design projects for the upcoming 2023-2024 school
year. These projects will give students real-world experience while providing a
service and potential solutions to collaborators.