Maintenance Management for Higher Ed
Many years ago I graduated from Michigan State University (in my slightly biased opinion one of the greatest institutions in the country). As a student I was fortunate enough to land the right job that afforded me to forge some great relationships within the campus. Over two summers I worked security in the dorm rooms at night, which allowed me to get a free room in the dorm over the entire summer. (By the way, living alone in an entire dorm that has 500 empty rooms is a little on the spooky side.) During the day, I was a member of a maintenance crew responsible for painting all of the dorm rooms. You would be surprised at what a college student can do to a dorm room in just a few short months. Really, how many ceilings should require painting because they are littered with burn marks? Again: burn marks. On the ceiling. Also, it should be noted that before a room can be painted, there are many undetermined foreign substances that have to be scraped off the walls, which is as gross as it sounds.
I think I’m digressing.
The point is that on campus there are many dorm rooms spread across many square acres. MSU for example, is over two miles wide (I know, I had to walk it in zero degree weather) with multiple dorms and literally thousands of rooms. Each area of the campus had its own maintenance crews responsible for painting the dorms over the summer. Amazingly, back in late 80’s early 90’s, this was an all-manual operation. The maintenance supervisor would go through each room, inspect it, leave a little piece of paper that indicated what required painting (and sometimes scraping) and that was the work order for the room. There was no automated solution, there was no solution that connected all of the work that needed be completed across the campus and there was no way to understand collectively if work was on or behind schedule.
Today, this all is changing in higher education campuses. Many universities already run PeopleSoft Campus Solutions and are extending that with a fully integrated PeopleSoft Maintenance Management solution, which is a logical and efficient step. This begets many benefits for the higher ed client: work orders can be generated as specific or general as required, crews assigned to the work, costs of labor and supplies measured, work progress in terms of on schedule or behind schedule analyzed on a continuous basis. This also all can be extended to a mobile solution so the maintenance supervisors can go room to room and enter information related to the asset and work order directly into PeopleSoft.
Compared to what I saw back in my days at MSU, it’s another world. Like, entirely.
We have come a long way from a manual, disconnected solution to a fully automated, integrated and mobile solution that provides us all of the information on a real time basis. I have spoken to clients about this on many occasions, and there’s a tremendous need in the marketplace to integrate these seemingly routine campus tasks into a maintenance system that ties back to larger campus solutions and finance apps. The level of pain and happenstance we dealt with back in the day needn’t be a reality today.
We have the tools. We should use them.
If you would like to understand more about the PeopleSoft Maintenance Management solution, don’t miss our white paper (the second one on the page). Likewise, if you have any questions about this, drop your thoughts in the comments or to me via email.
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More links:
MIPRO Consulting main website.
