Over the last several years, the Facilities Services team has diligently worked in conjunction with Business Affairs Technical Services to expand the use of technology to enhance both the user experience of our employees and the information we are able to gather about the maintenance of our campus assets. Due to the organization’s successes in the launch of operational dashboards and asset information capture through mobile apps, AssetWorks awarded Facilities Services the 2023 Innovation Award at their annual user conference. This award is presented in recognition of institutions who have made significant strides in utilizing technology to move their organizations forward.

Facilities Services has rolled out dashboards to all maintenance shops to assist with the management of the work order process and shop management activities. These dashboards are comprised of a variety of visual cues intended to direct managers to the most pressing work to be addressed by their shop as well as providing important quality control measures and information used for equitable division of labor across their teams.

Using an iterative approach to developing the dashboard using direct feedback from the shops as a guidepost, a comprehensive collection of metrics that both reinforce institutional goals and provide for easier management of overall shop activities was produced to be used across all maintenance teams while leaving flexibility for the addition of shop-specific data visualization. These metrics were then pushed to the homepage of the AiM, the Facilities Services CMMS, providing a high visibility location for the “data that matters” for operational efficiency and work order completion. The easy access of this data resulted in positive user interactions and a marked improvement in the provided metrics over the initial six-month implementation period.

This initiative utilized a mixture of native dashboarding capabilities provided through the vendor’s CMMS and Microsoft PowerBI to produce the final product adopted by our end users. For the elements provided through Microsoft BI, additional sources of information, including weather conditions and location mapping were able to be integrated into the view provided to operational teams. By expanding the scope of information outside of the work order and asset data contained in the CMMS, the implementation team was able to provide a more comprehensive data set with which managerial decisions could be made when dispatching work to technicians. Across the board, large improvements were seen in almost every measure presented in the first six months of dashboard deployment.