The main campus of the private research university, comprised of 100 buildings and exceeding four million gsf, is located on 260 acres in Coral Gables, a suburb just south of Miami, and serves nearly 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The University is the largest private employer in Miami-Dade County with more than 9,400 full- and part-time faculty and staff.

In 1989, Associate Vice President for Facilities Administration Victor Atherton began the cost-reduction process by identifying energy-saving opportunities. He quickly implemented projects to replace old, inefficient mechanical equipment and to upgrade the utility plants. Nearly every chiller on campus was replaced with new, high-efficiency units, greatly reducing operating costs. The University quickly recouped its investment through energy savings.

In 1990, he hired Michael White as director of Physical Plant. White's objective was to formalize an asset-management program to protect the University's investment in physical assets, estimated in value at nearly $1 billion. Considerable time was spent assessing the condition of every physical component of every facility, developing maintenance schedules for each component, and establishing an ongoing renewal plan to keep facilities in tip top condition.

Efforts began paying off for the Facilities Administration team. By 1994, building conditions and customer satisfaction were improving significantly, but worker productivity was perceived as low.

In the fall of 1994, White asked the Physical Plant supervisors for ideas to improve productivity. The supervisors estimated their workers' productivity at between 70 and 85 percent and, therefore, did not believe there was cause for concern. However, White's estimate was much lower, prompting him to call for a labor study to determine how much time employees were engaged in nine categories of activity, including working, troubleshooting, traveling, getting parts, doing paperwork, talking, cleaning up, being idle, and taking breaks.

Observing Employees at Work

White contacted Professor Shihab Asfour, chairman of the University's Department of Industrial Engineering, who had conducted labor studies for other corporations. Asfour assigned seven senior students to conduct a similar study under his supervision at the University's Coral Gables Campus.

The students spent four months in the spring of 1995 observing Physical Plant employees at job sites throughout the campus. They recorded thousands of observations that were used to draw statistically accurate conclusions, which were later presented to White. The students used pie charts to show the percentage of time the employees were engaged in each of the nine activities.

The charts showed that employees were working only 30.1 percent of the time. The next largest block of time, at 22 percent, was spent traveling, followed by taking breaks, 9.9 percent; troubleshooting, 9.8 percent; talking, 8.2 percent; being idle, 7.1 percent; getting parts, 6.7 percent; doing paperwork, 3.7 percent; and cleaning, 2.3 percent.

According to the information gathered by the students, only 26 of the University's 85 mechanics were working at any given point. Of the 59 who were not working, 19 were traveling, eight were taking breaks, eight were troubleshooting, seven were talking, six were idle, another six were getting parts, three were doing paperwork, and two were cleaning.

"Roughly 70 percent of our day was spent on non-productive activities. Productive time was even less than I had imagined," notes White. "However, we now had a benchmark and could begin the process of improving our situation."

Initiating Continuous Improvement Plans

To begin the improvement process, Bob Dale, director for Continuous Improvement (CI) at the University, suggested that White assemble a team of workers and supervisors to develop ideas for improving productivity. This CI team was responsible for conducting a root cause analysis to determine what factors were contributing to the components of non-productivity.

When the CI team reviewed the travel component, it found that nearly every employee had a truck and some workers were making frequent trips to the warehouse instead of stocking up in one trip. Team members also suspected that some employees made unnecessarily long trips across campus en route to jobs or at the end of the day to kill time.

Changes were made to have some employees report directly to their work areas at the beginning of the day and to have others assigned to satellite warehouse locations. The parts acquisition process was also revamped to allow materials to be delivered to the job site by a parts runner, reducing the need for workers to return to the warehouse. As a result, the University was able to reduce its vehicle fleet by 16 trucks.

The CI team discovered that supervisory issues contributed to excessive time spent talking, taking breaks, and being idle. Many supervisors, who are often the best crafts people in their fields, were promoted to leadership positions without being given the necessary training to do their jobs. Consequently, Human Resources officials and the Office of Staff Development assisted the department by implementing supervisory training programs.

The area of troubleshooting was also examined and employees were asked for their suggestions. The simple solution involved putting better information on the work orders to ensure the employee takes the right materials and tools to the job site and is fully informed of what the customer needs.

The engineering students found inefficiencies in the Materials Management department that resulted in hourly workers spending 6.7 percent of the day getting parts and supervisors spending an additional 7,000 hours per year obtaining parts from local vendors. Both workers and supervisors complained about the warehouse frequently being out of stock for many items.

"Materials Management is supervised by our Purchasing Department so we had our first cross-functional continuous improvement process," explains White. "Members of the Physical Plant staff, Materials Management, and Purchasing worked on this CI project for many months. As these efforts to improve efficiency did not prove effective, Purchasing made the decision to contract out Materials Management and service improved almost overnight."

Overcoming Organizational Obstacles

Team members then turned their attention to improving service in the work control department, streamlining workflow processes, and improving response time in the key and sign shops, two of the worst areas. After talking to employees and customers, it was clear that the organizational structure was impeding success.

"Our craft shop configuration was inefficient and did not foster accountability. This was especially noted when multiple shops worked on the same project," says White. "If the carpentry shop, for example, needed the services of the electricians or painters, our communication and the transfer of responsibility from one area to the other was often clumsy. Consequently, jobs were not performed in a timely manner. The lack of accountability made it difficult to respond to customers who inquired about the progress of a work order."

In order to improve accountability, the maintenance shops were reorganized into a zone configuration. The campus was divided into four geographic areas and all shop employees were reassigned to maintenance zones, each one approximately one million sf in size. Work order and budget data were studied to determine the best mix of resources, as well as staffing, for each zone. Qualified facilities managers were recruited for each of the zones, which include two academic zones, one housing zone, and an auxiliary zone.

"The new organization promotes a spirit of friendly competition between the zones because each group wants its zone to excel in all aspects of maintenance and customer service," says White. "Managers frequently use data from our CMMS to validate their achievements."

Monthly performance indicators measure productivity in each zone as determined by work order completion rates, response time, backlog level, preventive maintenance completed, customer satisfaction, sick time usage, and operations and maintenance costs per square foot. Additionally, the Facilities Condition Index (FCI), which is the ratio of the value of maintenance needs to the building replacement value, has proven to be a valuable tool in assessing the need for specific projects. However, since the FCI only measures deficiencies in excess of $5,000 per item, White developed a Maintenance Condition Index (MCI) to measure the smaller things. The MCI represents the value of the smaller maintenance deficiencies as a ratio of cost to building square footage. The department utilizes a part-time facilities inspector who systematically tours every part of the campus to record deficiencies under $5,000 per item.

Responding to Students' Needs

A second labor study was conducted two years later after reorganization of the department and implementation of a number of Continuous Improvement projects designed to streamline the workflow process. This second study, conducted in 1997, found a productivity increase from 30.1 to 65 percent. The study revealed that housing workers now usually responded to work orders within one day, eliminating the backlog.

During the summer months, the University typically spent more than $600,000 to refurbish the 1.2 million gsf of housing facilities that are home to 3,000-plus students during the school year. A CI project was created to reduce the cost without decreasing customer satisfaction. The work order management system enables the physical plant workers to see what type of calls are being placed the most often and address these needs first.

"This year, we were able to reduce the cost of our summer housing renovations by more than $370,000," says White. "We can put that money back into the facilities in the form of additional renewal projects. This benefits our students and workers alike."

Reaping the Benefits

Based on student input a hangtag, or customer comment card, was developed to notify customers of visits and inform them of the work that had been performed. Four questions are included on the card asking customers to rate the workers in the areas of timeliness, courteousness, cleanliness, and overall satisfaction. More than 100 cards are returned each month and a 98-percent satisfaction rating has been achieved.

The completion rate for preventive maintenance has increased from 40 to 90 percent with the help of detailed schedules and input from the zone managers. The amount of sick time taken by workers decreased by 44 percent from 1998 to 2002 with the implementation of an aggressive, but friendly, method of asking employees to provide explanations of why they miss work. As a result, more than 2,400 additional hours of work time were captured.

A 109-percent productivity improvement was realized from 1995 to 1997, while an 80-percent reduction in service response time was noted between 1995 and 2002. The CI projects also receive credit for reducing overtime by more than 1,400 hours since 1998, increasing the average square footage maintained per employee by 116 percent from 31,000 sf in 1998 to 67,000 sf in 2002. The academic building Facilities Condition Index dropped from 11.9 percent in 1993 to 3.4 percent in 2002.

"The bottom line is that good data is crucial for making good decisions. If you don't measure it, you can't effectively change it" says White. "There is ample evidence that facilities operations, in general, can improve core business processes."

By Tracy Carbasho

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