Swinburne University’s asset management project completed by FM Innovations
In late 1998, Outer Eastern TAFE - Victoria (who later merged with Swinburne University), began a process of reviewing their facility management. They had used a manual process for reporting on the configuration and use of assets that took a key employee three weeks to prepare.
The facilities team reviewed its business focus and practice. It defined a new asset management model that would bring all the asset data together and provide a big-picture view of each asset and its use.
Every space was deemed as an asset with attributes that deliver certain outcomes like room size, furniture, wall finishes and communications. And rather than a merely financial perspective on the assets, their function and performance were to be measured.
FM Innovations were asked to provide the software for this. To gain a faster payback for the TAFE, FM Innovations undertook a space asset management project. All the assets were contained in a visual database and the report for this, the one that used to take three weeks, now took five minutes.
Once the space assets were being managed, FM Innovations gathered information on other key assets. The government legislation had changed and required the TAFE to operate more like a commercial entity and improve the asset management.
The space database allowed the TAFE to quickly introduce the government changes and plan strategically to go even further. The existing asset maintenance database and paper records were migrated to FM Innovations’ asset management system. Workflow improved, work management practices improved, data quality improved and response time to TAFE’s internal customers also improved.
Meanwhile, the merger with Swinburne was announced. Works were becoming automatically managed and planned, and contractor performance could now be compared with other sites.
FM Innovations integrated the triennial audit database with the space system, and the facilities team implemented a ‘self-serve’ capability to asset maintenance.
These improvements were of great value in the merging of the institutions. In the last few years, Swinburne have increased this commercial operational improvement yet further. OH&S reporting, project time recording and distributing standardised policy documents are some of their landmarks.
Judy Grabham, Space Manager and Coordinator of Swinburne, says that the results from the involvement of FM Innovations have helped Swinburne to transform their existing practices. They are able to enjoy a much more efficient response to maintenance requests, a minimised paper trail, fewer calls but better customer service, faster requests to other campuses, better planned maintenance, significant cost reductions for a given level of performance and much better reports.
FM Innovations have helped Swinburne in the following way:
- Report generation cut from 3 weeks to 5 minutes
- Databases centralised into ‘one truth’
- Work orders generated faster, more accurately
- Response time to work orders improved
- Workflow improved
- Data collection and quality improved
- OH&S reporting improved
- Project time recording improved
- Standardised Policy Documents distributed
4-Nov-2008