How F&S is changing the future of maintenance on the St. George campus

With nearly 130 buildings and a district energy system to maintain on a campus that will double its square footage in the next 30 years, planning and coordination are becoming increasingly indispensable for Facilities & Services teams.

On June 1, 2022—after a two-year journey alongside our Information and Technology Services partners—F&S launched a new suite of digital and mobile applications to facilitate preventive maintenance and repairs on the St. George campus.

The new applications enabled establishing the first database for tens of thousands of utilities and building equipment, automating the planning of preventive maintenance programs, and improving day-to-day tasks such as scheduling and assigning work orders.

Trades and maintenance staff are now equipped with Asset Manager, a mobile application through which they receive and create orders in the field, look up equipment information, and document their work. Over time, Asset Manager will help F&S begin building a detailed digital maintenance record for campus assets that will help make decisions on how best to proceed with future repairs and where to invest in preventive maintenance to reduce breakdowns and increase the reliability of our campus facilities.

The process has changed dramatically for F&S staff—and they have risen to the challenge.

Today, when a client submits a request or contacts the call centre with an urgent repair, a digital work order is created and assigned to a tradesperson or engineer. As F&S staff members work through repairs, requests, and preventive tasks, the status of the work and their notes are updated in real time, improving visibility and collaboration between F&S maintenance teams.

The implementation has also opened doors for visual and powerful reporting and in the future, data mining to ultimately improve F&S stewardship of the campus and client service.

“In our five-year strategic plan that we published in 2019, we set out to become leaders in campus stewardship and deliver superior customer service to departments and divisions on campus,” said Ron Saporta, U of T’s chief operating officer, property services and sustainability. “This implementation is a big step in this plan that allows us to leverage data from our systems and operations to assess and manage our performance, identify opportunities for planned maintenance, and one day soon, predict failures of major assets on our campus before they occur. That is our vision.”

Implementing the new systems required tremendous effort and teamwork from many individuals across the university. F&S project team members worked with many members of Enterprise Applications and Solutions Integration, Digital Workplaces, Learning Space Management, and the Learning and Leadership Centre teams to design, develop, test, and prepare F&S for the new workflows and digital tools.

“This project has been a unique mosaic of contributions by many talented people from across U of T—each adding a piece of the puzzle at the right time to bring us to the finish line,” said Anna Kulikov, senior manager at F&S and the lead on the implementation. “The best part is that, while the project is wrapping up, the journey doesn’t end here. We have a lot of work to do to support our people through the changes, make tweaks to what could be working better, and implement what is already a solid list of ideas directly from our staff.”

Over the summer, F&S will continue to support staff in learning and using the new applications and focus on establishing regular reporting to power continuous improvement.