In 1863, a group of New York City businessmen raised $100,000 to found a company that insured Civil War sailors and soldiers against disabilities result ing from wartime wounds, accidents, and sickness. In 1868, the company started selling "ordinary" insurance to the middle class, naming itself after the New York City Metropolitan district in which they had been successful. Today, MetLife has approximately $2.1 trillion of life insurance in force. To support this business, the company's Facilities and Services group has devised an e-FM program that will unite multiple software products and support MetLife's real estate and facilities operations.

Charting the Path
MetLife uses a variety of software products to manage its physical asset portfolio. But too many applications can lead to frustration and inflated costs, according to Karalyn Ditaranto, Project Manager in the Facilities and Services department at MetLife. Overlapping functionality, duplicate data, too many low-level data reports yet too few high-end management reports, and limited distribution to MetLife's users, customers, and vendors all stand in the way of meeting business needs.

In response, MetLife chartered an e-FM project that would consolidate and track all real estate data within a single database, uniting lease and property management, space management, move management, project management and strategic planning information. The solution would also offer the capability to manage work orders, preventive maintenance, furniture and equipment assets, and hoteling. "The goal is to create a comprehensive Web-based front-end that's accessible via MetLife's Facilities and Services Intranet," says Ditaranto. The system will also be integrated with corporate systems for financial purposes.

PeopleSoft Integration
Integration is nothing new to MetLife's Facilities and Services group. In 2001 the group developed an interface between ARCHIBUS and the PeopleSoft® Asset Management program in an effort to better track the location, ownership, and condition of the company's physical assets.

"Our goal is that when new assets come into MetLife, we can assign them to a specific employee and location via ARCHIBUS before they are passed into PeopleSoft," says Ditaranto. "Then, when a new project calls for furniture, we can use the asset tracking information to locate unused equipment that can be brought over from another location instead of buying new pieces." Such careful tracking can also reduce the number of assets that need to be written off-in a company the size of MetLife, this can represent significant savings.

The integration between ARCHIBUS and PeopleSoft was especially useful during a recent large-scale move, which relocated 1,700 MetLife employees at once. "To prepare for the move, we created trial layouts in the Strategic Master Planning application," says Ditaranto. "Data feeds from PeopleSoft were coming into us on a regular basis, providing us with employee information such as terminations and new hires. If one of these PeopleSoft feeds showed that an employee had been terminated, for example, we could change our trial layouts accordingly." According to Ditaranto, this system eased the relocation of hundreds and hundreds of employees. The remaining 500 or so employees will move at the end of the year.

MetLife also uses ARCHIBUS to help maintain internal rent details. "Every month we submit ARCHIBUS reports to corporate controllers," says Ditaranto. "These reports are fed into the General Ledger, from which customers get accountability charges. This helps us better respond to customers who wonder how their rents are calculated." Other frequent reports include vacancy, headcount, and building analysis. "The system's speed and ease of use are important when it comes to reporting."

Creating a Centralized Repository
The e-FM system will also position ARCHIBUS as a central repository for building operations tasks, especially preventive maintenance. For example, physical on-demand maintenance is currently managed though an ASP (application service provider) backed by Cushman and Wakefield. The e-FM project adds preventive maintenance from ARCHIBUS to the mix, using a feed from buildings operations and centralizing the work order process. This includes tracking how many jobs are running, the people responsible for them, invoicing information, and other work order management statistics.

MetLife will also be integrating ARCHIBUS with Lease Harbor, an ASP which helps manage the company's 35 owned and leased properties. Lease Harbor will send feeds to ARCHIBUS, which acts as the central repository. "Our whole portfolio-both owned and leased properties-can be pulled up with details such as head count, costs, and square footage," says Ditaranto. "From one place we can punch in cost center or department and get statistics for any of our properties. To us, it will appear to be part of one seamless system." Adding FM Studio (an ARCHIBUS ADN product) to the mix will enable MetLife to easily create and distribute reports.

Application Hosting Solutions
MetLife chose to use an application hosting solution from ARCHIBUS business partner AssistGlobal to support the e-FM project. This creates a purpose-built information portal called a Data Condo, which is based on Citrix "thin client" technology. "We access ARCHIBUS, AutoCAD, Crystal Reports, and FM Studio through a virtual desktop," says Ditaranto. "All we need is an Internet connection to download information, and information is available anywhere, anytime. Not only did we eliminate a lot of IT costs, we're also getting the support we need." The department's customers, which include MetLife's many lines of business, can also access the Facilities and Services Web portal at any time, helping themselves to the information they need to carry out their daily routines.

The e-FM project will benefit space administrators, operation managers, designers and project managers, strategic planners, and more, according to Ditaranto, opening up the avenues of communication among departments. "Self-service is our #1 goal right now," she says.