Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is an urban university with 29,000 students and over 16,000 faculty and staff. VCU currently occupies approximately 172 buildings located on two main campuses containing over 7 million square feet in net useable space.
The facilities management department is currently responsible for tracking over 28,000 individual rooms and over 200 departments.
Before implementing FMDesktop, VCU used a home-grown space management system built on SQL Server. This system had no ability to link the floorplans and database together. Reporting was limited to tabular reports and static floorplans. Each time data was changed, drawings were manually updated to reflect the changes, a process that was both time-consuming and prone to error.
VCU currently uses an SQL Server version of FMDesktop as its primary tool for space management, and has created many customized reports to meet its specific operational needs. Drawings and data are synchronized at all times, minimizing the effort required to deliver accurate reports that include both data and drawings.
Additionally, VCU has linked FMDesktop to a research grant awards database (also built in SQL) and is able to produce graphical reports on floorplans based on the revenue a room generates. Management believes that the time saved in producing this single report from FMDesktop has already paid for the system. In the past, the person responsible for manually creating this report was engaged in the process for 3 weeks per quarter. Since implementing FMDesktop, those 3 weeks of time have been reduced to a single day. The 12 weeks of saved time per year has allowed this person to be engaged in more productive activities.
The facilities management administrator at VCU has also produced several Web pages that access live space data from FMDesktop. These Web pages are made accessible through a secured website. Once logged in, individual department personnel access only the information specific to their department.
VCU imported existing data from their old system into FMDesktop in less than 1 day. The facilities management administrator has also personalized several of FMDesktop’s many standard reports to meet specific VCU information reporting needs. Most of the report modifications were also completed in less than 1 day.
