Infrastructure and Transportation, the ministry responsible for managing the Alberta government’s land and facilities, had several goals in mind when it requested proposals to upgrade the management of its vast inventory of space and workplace environments. Alberta’s space management program was clearly out-of-date and not keeping up with the increase in volume, complexity, and the rapid change of an entity such as the Government of Alberta.

“We were using old software—DOS with Dbase and Clipper,” explains applications development manager Bob Silversides, “Our lease inventory applications were outdated, and we needed to convert to something more current.”

To modernize, integrate, and innovate might be a broad description of its aims. Infrastructure and Transportation wanted to better automate its lease and space management systems; to integrate and orchestrate BLIMS functionalities with existing resident applications such as Lease Inventory, Lease Forecasting, and Lease Status Systems; and to innovate wherever opportunities presented themselves (there were several). After a thorough screening and procurement process, Infrastructure and Transportation selected the FAMIS Workplace Management System to achieve these goals.

Currently FAMIS, together with some of the Ministry’s resident applications such as IMAGIS (Peoplesoft Financials) with which FAMIS is able to freely interface, is used to manage the entire Alberta Infrastructure portfolio. The system is being used to execute three broad business processes: Space Inventory Control and Management of Leases, Parking Inventory Management, and Parcel Management. The management and monitoring of the entire life cycle of all Alberta lease agreements, from initiation to expiration, including integration with Receivables and Payables, is scheduled to roll out in summer 2008.

Space Inventory

Infrastructure and Transportation uses FAMIS to identify, quantify, and track key attributes of all the government workspace owned or leased by the Province of Alberta. An identity hierarchy from site to building to space is used to describe the assets. The workplace management team links every building to a parcel and then breaks down the building by floors and space. A space is defined as any area with a definable wall—hard wall offices, meeting rooms, coffee rooms, etc. Spaces that contain modular walls are defined as “open” portions of a space and are not tracked individually.

As is often the case, the identity and attribute capturing process begins with a blueprint. The blueprint of the building is converted into a CAD drawing using BOMA standards. Currently, Infrastructure and Transportation is initiating a project to link the CAD drawing to the FAMIS database, which will enable the Ministry to run graphical reports that represent how the building is being utilized. By the end of 2008, the Province expects to have the CAD drawings of its entire real estate portfolio linked to the FAMIS database. Once the links are made, Infrastructure and Transportation will use the FAMIS Visual Map functionality to provide users with very detailed, highly interactive Web presentations of drawings that pertain to their specific facilities. One of the core advantages of an Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) like FAMIS is the dramatic increase in visibility it can achieve. Visibility creates accountability. The ability not only to create benchmarks, but also to see them, and share key measures of success with stakeholders in a timely and graphical manner has proven a valuable management tool. Features like zoom-go-to searches for employees, office spaces, conference rooms, etc., add powerful tools to staff and leadership alike. Other vital features of FAMIS Visual Map include:

• Menu-driven preparation of graphical presentation
• Color selections that include What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)
• Thematic coloring and hatching with fixed selections based on variable values
• Selection of spaces based on complex criteria
• Dynamic labeling on drawings, or as pop-ups, or both
• Data security and reports based on FAMIS Security
• Tabular Reporting based on drawing scope, selected area, or fenced area

Workspace throughout the Province is used by many different ministries, boards, agencies, and organizations as occupants, some by those within the government and some leased to non-government users. In many cases, Infrastructure and Transportation has multiple users associated with a single space. FAMIS enables the Ministry to track spaces according to the percentage of use for which each occupant is responsible. Staff says this has been very helpful in preparing key reports. Owned and leased space is identified and tracked according to attributes that are important to the determination of accommodation costing: terms, operations, amortization, projects, revenue, etc. Costs are tracked to each building and then distributed to occupants, which in turn include them in the financial statements they report to the auditor general. One of the core benefits of using a system like FAMIS is that once the database has been completed, the information can be used, pushed, shared, and integrated with other applications to create new efficiencies and, perhaps more important, effective new cost controls.

Reports

Reporting was a very high priority objective associated with the implementation of the FAMIS system. Once the conversion of core facilities information was made and the FAMIS database was complete, creating essential reports was the next big challenge. Again, the FAMIS database provided a foundation over which Infrastructure and Transportation was able to build several custom reporting programs that were important to the overall management of the Province. The Lease Book Report is a “basic lifting of all active leases” for use by staff and senior management alike. The Expiry Report helps to monitor and manage expiring leases, which are critical to the successful operation of such a large leasing portfolio.

Lease Management: Orchestrating the Province

Infrastructure and Transportation is in the process of converting its old Lease Status System to a FAMIS-based application.

“We have the ability to use a component of the FAMIS Capital Projects business process to manage leasing projects, from inception to expiration,” says Doug Stefanyk, acting business administration officer. “This process will be implemented in summer 2008.”

Functionalities within the FAMIS Capital Projects application enable Infrastructure and Transportation to document the entire life cycle of every lease within its sizeable lease portfolio. The history of negotiated terms, the offer to lease, the agreement itself, and all subsequent milestones of the leasing process, including a thorough cost analysis, will be documented, automated and integrated with Infrastructure and Transportation’s Receivables and Payables program. Even lease billings and payments will be orchestrated by FAMIS and other applications with which it is able to interface. The integration with lease administration, using other parts of FAMIS, is seamless.

Parking Stall Management: Award-Winning Innovation

One of the core benefits of the FAMIS system is its adaptability, not only to changing conditions, but also to challenges not readily perceived as subject to an IWMS solution. Alberta Infrastructure needed to modernize its real estate, office space, and leasing management, but that wasn’t all. It also had a parking challenge.

The Ministry leases about 32,000 parking stalls to its occupants. Keeping track of those leases has been a very large, complex, and dynamic challenge. Infrastructure and Transportation staff recognized that the FAMIS solutions that were streamlining workflow in facilities management could also ease many of the complexities of its parking stall leasing.

“It is a major improvement that made our life so much easier,” says Lynn Benn, coordinator, property inventory and parking administration. The Infrastructure and Transportation Parking Stall lease solution is a good example of all of its initial objectives being fulfilled in an inspired use of the FAMIS system: Automation, Integration, and Innovation.

As with its office space management, each parking stall is considered a space. Each space is assigned a space ID or what Infrastructure and Transportation calls an administration number. The number is used to track the status of each parking stall, reservation status, hours of availability, location (indoors or out), as well as whether the parking stall is with or without energized stalls. All the parking stall information can be stored within FAMIS. Access to the data enables Infrastructure and Transportation to calculate the rate to be charged for any particular parking stall. Once stalls are assigned to an individual, FAMIS interacts with Infrastructure and Transportation’s IMAGIS to execute billing and handle receivables.

“We use the FAMIS functionality to create the leasing informational product,” explain Benn. “Then FAMIS interfaces with our IMAGIS billing system.”

The system works differently for government and non-government employees. For government employees, for example, a parking stall is assigned to an individual and FAMIS and IMAGIS combine functions to deduct the proper dollar amount from the employee pay check. The deduction is uploaded back into the FAMIS employee table on the seventh of each month to monitor the use of the space.

For non-government employees and contractors, Infrastructure and Transportation has developed a new business process that leverages the inherent integration between the FAMIS Occupancy Management product and the FAMIS Real Estate Administration product to perform direct debits from the individual’s bank account. When a new non-government employee or contractor is assigned a parking stall, it is entered into the FAMIS Real Estate Administration tool as a lease. It is assigned a lease ID, a customer number, and a payment ID. Once the information is in the system, a monthly extract from FAMIS feeds the information to IMAGIS. Then IMAGIS generates accounts receivable records. Once reviewed and approved, monthly invoices are uploaded to an FTP site for the banks to perform a direct debit from accounts across various financial institutions.

The innovative new process was developed in April 2006 as a solution to the problem of fee collection for parking stalls utilized by non-government employees and contractors. Not only did the high rate of turnover among contractors often make it very difficult to track and obtain payment, but it required two full-time Infrastructure and Transportation employees to do so. Since leveraging FAMIS to implement the new business process, the Ministry has been able to recoup nearly 100 percent of the revenue it had previously been forced to report as lost. The success of the new parking stall leasing program has also inspired other agencies within Infrastructure and Transportation to find opportunities for collecting uncollected revenue and recovering costs.

The Transportation and Utility Corridor program (TUC), for example, has been identified as another area within Infrastructure and Transportation that could potentially use the system in its revenue collection. FAMIS has a reputation for being able to interact smoothly with other applications within a customer’s information systems, and Infrastructure and Transportation’s Parking Stall Leasing process is a good example of how beneficial a seamless, trouble-free integration can be.

Parcel Inventory

The Province of Alberta has a very large inventory of land and understands the need to manage this portfolio. Using FAMIS to increase the efficiency, accuracy, and cost control of the Land Title process used for all of its land holdings was one of Infrastructure and Transportation’s initial priorities. It recently completed linking FAMIS to the Government of Alberta’s Registries (Land Titles Office), which enables it to easily obtain the Certificate of Title (COT) for each parcel within its portfolio. Each COT can have several Land Identification Number Codes (LINCS), and each one is entered into FAMIS as a parcel. Land parcels may be leased independently or together. To reduce human error and the chance of duplicating entries, the Ministry currently downloads the COT directly into FAMIS from the Land Title Office. Once the information is downloaded into FAMIS, each parcel can be analyzed for types of usage. Infrastructure and Transportation is investigating the possibility of entering the space units for each parcel into FAMIS. On a ten-acre parcel, for example, there could be one occupant using two acres, one using five acres, and one using three. Each segment of use is considered a parcel space unit. Once the parcel space units are entered into FAMIS, the analysis of the parcel can attain the granular level of detail that has been so successful in the management of parking stalls and office spaces.

Automate • Integrate • Innovate

Automation, Integration, and Innovation were the broad based objectives for Alberta’s conversion to a more modern IWMS program, and FAMIS was its system of choice. The automation of space management has not only increased the efficiency of facilities data processing, reporting, and planning, but has also added a valuable visibility and Web-communications capability that keeps all stakeholders informed and involved. Better visibility tends to create accountability, with better cost-control and recovery the ultimate benefit. The ability of the FAMIS system to interact freely, pushing information back and forth between its own business processes and resident applications such as IMAGIS, was instrumental in the innovative use of FAMIS to manage Infrastructure and Transportation’s approximately 32,000 parking stalls. FAMIS is built upon an open, Web-based, service-oriented architecture that enables users not only to document, automate, and analyze from the granular to strategic level, but also to ‘orchestrate’ information—a term used by FAMIS to describe its next-generation interactivity—among pertinent staff and management. Simply stated, the open architecture enables orchestration and encourages innovation, as the award-winning parking stall process gives testimony. Since implementation of the FAMIS system, Alberta Infrastructure and Transportation has been able to automate, integrate, and innovate the management of its vast space, parking, and parcel inventory to the benefit of its employees and clients.

© 2008 FM:Systems Inc. Reprinted with Permission.

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