University of Pécs
In 2010, the University of Pécs initiated the creation of a new area management system. The aim of the new system was to establish an accurate building register, where all planned maintenance tasks could be tracked and managed in the years ahead, with special focus on its service areas, database connections, and existing workflows and processes at the time. Drawing from our prior experiences, we have decided that the most important criterion had to be that the main database of the system must be fully accurate, exactly matching reality. The data we had entered into the previous database was no longer available, the sketches we had painstakingly made about the buildings vanished, and whatever had remained was not connected to the right unique identifier. We often faced the issue of having multiple “Building A”s on various sites and quite a few offices that had the exact same room number.
We had involved all stakeholders of our facility management team throughout our internal consultations and concluded that the new system would need to be able to handle all our technical, financial, IT, and facility management processes we had at the time. We have started our market research to find out which software are capable of handling all or at least most of our critical processes we have defined. Our lessons learned from working with the previous system were that we would only be able to avoid falling into the same trap if we had a database that is built on a graphical platform, thus enabling all buildings and assets to be precisely located on a map, corresponding to its real physical location.
We had 246 buildings surveyed in two phases, during which we scanned 440,000 sqm. As a result, we created the university’s hierarchical structure for the database. All data points had a well-defined place in the structure, and this data became very well organized in the database. We have created a comprehensive and transparent building portfolio register with accurate information available down to a room level, which is essential at a building portfolio of this size. The software, thanks to its user interface and its intuitive nature, has been easy to learn and easy to use. Its logical connections are also easy to understand for users not only with an IT background but with a facility management background as well. It is much simpler and faster to enter new data into the system or query existing data from it.
