Switching your team to a preventative maintenance plan can be tricky, but facility managers have successfully implemented these approaches despite the challenges. Tim Fargo is the project manager for facility operations at Edgewood College, and his team was able to smoothly transition to a preventative maintenance plan with the help of his team’s facility management software (FMS). Let’s explore how he and his team did it.
Campus Challenges
Edgewood College was established in 1927 in Madison, Wis., and the beautiful, historic campus houses 17 buildings across 55 acres of land. Fargo has been with the college for eight years and has watched the college physically transform during its multiple construction projects.
Even though this construction was critical to the campus’ future, most of the issues his team encountered followed these new construction projects or remodels. “We were having trouble balancing preventative tasks with the growing number of reactive requests. After trying multiple software solutions, we realized we needed a software that offered more than just a way to take in work orders so we could get ahead,” Fargo said.
The facilities team at Edgewood College decided they needed a way to access information that was up-to-date, accurate and easy to access to solve their maintenance problems. After evaluating software options, Fargo and his team chose to implement AkitaBox, a visual-based facility management software with data collection services, to manage Edgewood College’s buildings and grounds.
Implementing a Facility Management Software
Fargo first worked with the AkitaBox data collection team in 2016 to create digital floor plans of his facilities and document asset information on only the fixtures he deemed critical – HVAC and plumbing. The AkitaBox team transposed the information into the floor-plan-based software, and a dedicated customer success manager trained Fargo and his team on the software platform. The entire on-boarding process only took the team 90 days.
“The feature we use the most as a team is the visual floor plan viewer. It has helped us figure out what work needs to be done to move people from room to room. We can view what’s in a room without having to physically go down to it by pulling up the floor plans.” -Tim Fargo
After implementing AkitaBox, Fargo and his team have seen numerous benefits, but the biggest success for his team was knowing which assets needed to be fixed versus which assets needed to be totally replaced. “AkitaBox has made it easier to keep track of our assets and find the problematic ones to make sure we replace them when we need to,” he explained.
For more information on how Fargo’s team implemented AkitaBox and the results his facility team reported, download the Edgewood College case study.
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