Cincinnati Public Schools:
Major Modernization Program in a Class by Itself with
Advanced Building Maintenance Applications

Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) is Ohio’s third-largest public school district, with approximately 70 schools spread across a 90-square-mile area. Beginning in 2002, it embarked on a major, ten-year long initiative to upgrade its educational facilities, turning them into modern 21st century learning environments. In addition to tearing down schools that were outmoded and/or underutilized, ongoing construction projects include both new buildings and extensive renovations of often architecturally significant older buildings, all carried out under the district's $985 million Facilities Master Plan. Through 2010, CPS’ ambition is to achieve both educational and operational goals for Cincinnati’s students and taxpayers alike. But to ensure this investment in upgraded facilities and equipment is sustained over time, the district implemented ARCHIBUS’s Building Operations Management, Space Management, and Furniture & Equipment Management applications. These core applications have been designed to align CPS’ maintenance and asset tracking procedures with the state’s detailed requirements.

Ensuring Compliance with the School Facilities Commission
The district collaborates with the Ohio School Facilities Commission to fund renovations and new construction. To that end, the commission releases a design manual with which all school districts’ architects must comply. CPS must, therefore, submit a maintenance plan to the commission in order to receive funding for on-going maintenance of their buildings.

CPS worked with ARCHIBUS Business Partner in4mation to collect details about the schools’ real estate, and plant and equipment inventory for submission through OSFC’s Web site. Once the commission receives this data, it generates reports on the schools’ assets and prescribes preventive maintenance procedures. Using this information, the district develops an ongoing maintenance and capital replacement budget for each new school. These guidelines and requirements are then downloaded from the state commission into CPS’ ARCHIBUS Building Operations Management system along with warranty information, vendor and manufacturer lists, and recommended PM schedules, providing the CPS facility team the facility data to use in its daily work order and preventive maintenance activities. This ensures that all items are tracked as the buildings are built and maintained.

Taking Work Orders to the Web
Along with CPS’ 10-year plan to rebuild and renovate its facilities came the need to upgrade its maintenance management processes. To do this, it had to make the transition from centralized, manual work-order processing to a distributed, self-service Web-based system.

Leveraging the flexibility of ARCHIBUS’s open architecture, a custom Web-interface solution, called iFM provides a user-friendly interface for individuals across the district to input and monitor requests for maintenance through an ASP-based system hosted by Applied Data Systems, Inc.

With over 15,000 work-orders generated in a given year, the ability to have CPS employees input their own work-order requests has greatly reduced the time it takes to initiate action while increasing order accuracy. Moreover, the new work orders, which can now also be entered via the Web, are automatically linked to floor plans for better visualization.

“Prior to implementing ARCHIBUS, to say we didn’t know how many work orders we were processing each year would have been an understatement,” says Mike Albrecht, CAFM Analyst of CPS’ Facilities Group. “In fact, the number was 20% more than we thought. With the ARCHIBUS solution, though, we’ve seen a marked improvement in the number of work orders tracked and closed, based on our analysis.”

The ARCHIBUS Building Operations and other solutions also ensure that the investment in new facilities is sustained over the projected 25-year useful life of the buildings the district is constructing.

The school system can also track the preventive maintenance history of all its equipment through ARCHIBUS and use it to estimate the life of the equipment and generate replacement costs 20 years into the future.

Integrated Key Control, Fleet Management
While education opens doors for students, CPS’ staff and educators have quite a few doors to open for themselves – making accurate key control data essential for maintaining building security.

That’s why Web screens in the iFM Web application provide integration with the existing work-order system in ARCHIBUS to track the approximately 6,400 keys in circulation, among more than 1,800 key holders, and the roughly 1,100 annual key requests. Links from the work request screen or key inventory screens allow CPS facility staff to quickly document keys issued, and print custom key signature forms for official sign-off.

Along with its key control module, CPS has also implemented ARCHIBUS’s Fleet Management application to improve oversight of its vehicles’ maintenance and condition data. Whether it’s a question of managing keys, cars, or classrooms, Cincinnati Public Schools has clearly found the answers it needs in its robust portfolio of ARCHIBUS and related solutions.

“One of the main benefits of using ARCHIBUS has been accountability; there are no more lost work orders or finger pointing,” adds Mike Albrecht. “With these digital processes, work flow is easy to track and monitor. The availability of metrics for report generation within ARCHIBUS, using Crystal reports for custom reporting, has also been invaluable. So is our association with in4mation. They’ve been great to work with.”