Dive Brief:
- Facilitron is expanding its partnership with Orange County Public Schools, the eighth largest U.S. school district, which serves over 200,000 students, by implementing its Facilitron Works computerized maintenance management system.
- The CMMS, which OCPS deployed in June, replaces three different software systems the central Florida district previously used for maintenance work orders, said Facilitron CEO Jeff Benjamin.
- The deployment will further streamline and enhance the management of OCPS’ facilities, optimizing operations across the district’s 900-square-mile area and boosting the efficiency of maintaining its physical assets, Facilitron said.
Dive Insight:
The partnership between Facilitron and OCPS, which began in 2020, initially focused on Facilitron’s flagship product, Facilitron S&R, for scheduling and managing facility rentals. Over time, this relationship grew to incorporate Facilitron BAS, a building automation system that integrates HVAC schedules and other building systems with Facilitron S&R, per the release.
As part of the five-month rollout, Facilitron teams were on site in the district in the weeks before and after deployment to train administrators, supervisors, maintenance workers and staff, Benjamin said.
Within a month of its launch, thousands of Facilitron Works users in the OCPS district have created more than 15,000 work orders, and over 400 workers have been added to the district’s three maintenance regions, Facilitron said. Technicians have logged more than 20,000 labor hours completing over 4,000 work orders to date.
At OCPS, the Facilitron Works app replaces WNA, SAP and EasyVista for maintenance work orders, Benjamin said.
EasyVista was used to track some maintenance work orders despite being primarily configured for information technology work, while SAP — which the district primarily uses for finance functions — was receiving significant numbers of duplicate work orders first entered in WNA, he said.
“There was literally a team of people whose job it was to enter work orders from WNA to SAP,” Benjamin said. “They may still port some information to SAP, but not nearly what they previously had to do.”
Nationwide, school facilities managers have been contending with aging infrastructure, staffing issues, equipment breakdowns and delays in repairs and maintenance. The findings of a survey of 1,625 U.S. public schools conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics earlier this year reflect long-standing concerns among policy officials over the conditions of older school facilities and the need to replace multiple building systems, including HVAC units.
The shift to Facilitron Works will enable more effective coordination of maintenance and operations tasks, including work orders, asset management and preventive maintenance, with features that enable more targeted access to work orders and direct assignment of work orders, Facilitron said.
OCPS’ Facilitron Works deployment will involve using a newer “partitioning” feature that allows OCPS to segregate the system into the three geographical regions and four separate departments, creating seven parallel systems, according to Benjamin. That allows users in one region or department to review relevant data without having to work through data from other regions or departments, he said.
The Facilitron Works deployment marks the first time OCPS maintenance workers have had a mobile app, which they can use to receive, execute and close work order assignments, he said. In addition, facilities managers can use the app to auto-assign orders to different trades, workers or supervisors, and upload photos to complement written work order descriptions, replacing a system that offered no way to assign work orders, he said.
Facilitron Works also has a GPS feature that shows shared work orders by location. OCPS finds this capability beneficial because it allows workers to determine whether to pick up work assigned to others while they are at the relevant location, enabling district staff to better manage their time, Benjamin said.
OCPS is adopting Facilitron Works at a time of significant growth for the CMMS industry. Last year, CMMS provider Limble raised $58 million in a funding round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s growth equity fund. In May, HelixIntel announced a new CMMS solution as a key part of its PropertyOS software platform, while CMMS startup NodaFi secured $3.5 million in seed funding in July, with a goal of doubling its employee head count and booking a 500% revenue increase this year.
In June, Facilitron announced updates to Facilitron Works, including an AI-powered function that would allow staff and school administrators to review and eliminate possible duplicate orders and leverage previous work orders to produce more accurate maintenance requests.
