Publish date: 3 December 2024
After 26 years in the Australian Army, Paul Myhill was used to everything being in its place. And if something wasn’t where it should be, he could find it pretty quickly.
When the Warrant Officer left the service to take up a maintenance job at Bethanie 22 years ago, it is fair to say things were rather different.
"We were still running everything on carbon copy job sheets and there was no centralised asset register, so we didn’t know what equipment was where,” he says. “It was very different to the coordination in the Defence Force; I could look up any piece of equipment in Australia and find out when it had been repaired.”
Paul joined the Army at 15 as an electrical mechanic apprentice, working his way up to Warrant Officer with the Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (RAEME). After running a base workshop in Brisbane, he was keen to settle back in Perth where his family was from. When the Army wanted to move him over to Melbourne, he spotted the advertisement for a scheduler at Bethanie, then known as Churches of Christ Homes & Community Services Inc.
“I hadn’t done an interview in 26 years and thought I’d better practice,” he says with a laugh. “They rang me up at the end of September and said could I start in October and I said ‘I probably can but I’m still in the Army!’”
Paul was able to wrangle three months long service leave, start at Bethanie and then went back to the Army for one day in January to get his discharge papers. “And I’ve been at Bethanie ever since.”
He’s certainly been busy, helping to modernise the maintenance system with the introduction of BEIMS (Building and Engineering Information Management System), now known as Pulse, in July 2007.
"It captured all the buildings, all the assets, all the hot water systems, all the air cons,” Paul says. “We barcoded every piece of equipment and built the infrastructure within BEIMS to manage all the facilities.”
Paul's next move was to get the plumbers and electricians into standard trade vehicles. "Then we got them on to tablets and phones so they could get their work orders electronically, instead of sending them in paper form,” he says.
Once the maintenance workers moved from the Bethanie’s sites and came under Paul's responsibilities ten years ago, they also received phones or iPads to record jobs in the system.
"We could then manage assets and start doing all the preventive maintenance,” he says. “By 2020 we were basically paperless.”
While there was plenty of job satisfaction in embedding efficient systems, it is the people rather than the processes that kept Paul at Bethanie for so long.
"I started with Nick, a plumber, who was with me for 22 years; Frances, my maintenance coordinator, had been with me for 15 years,” he says. “I had a couple of staff who retired last year - Greg, who looked after all the maintenance workers retired after 20 years and Brian, a trade assistant, retired after 15 years.”
With 20 staff and a high retention rate averaging well over a decade, this was a team that clearly worked well together.
“Everybody helped each other. If one of the plumbers needed a hand on a site, the maintenance guys would jump in and get on a shovel and dig a hole,” Paul says. “It was just a really good team. And because of that people stayed.”
With retirement looming in December, Paul has had a few months to get used to the fact he has no staff for the first time in decades - “even when I was a Warrant Officer, I had 30 or 40 staff to worry about”. The fact the phone isn’t ringing at all hours is different too.
“I was basically on call all the time – if a fire alarm when off on Christmas morning or anything like that,” he says. Though the on-call tradies knew not to ring him before 1pm on a Saturday, when Paul was busy working on his golf handicap.
He is looking forward to spending a lot more time on the golf course come the new year. “And I’ve got four grandkids, they’re all school ages, so I’ll be able to go to their school functions and school carnivals and I’ll probably end up with some babysitting duties,” he says.
After working for almost 50 years, Paul has certainly earned those extra walks down the fairways – and hopefully a few birdies, too.
