How Archibus Can Benefit Educational Institutions

An efficient Facilities Management System allows an organization to maintain its physical assets to perform optimally even during changing conditions. Facilities Management is generally linked to the maintenance of the building or structure. But, it is far more than that, especially when it’s an educational institute that we are talking about.

The role of facilities management in an educational institute is to maintain and operate the building to meet the needs of the students and teachers alike. Teaching and learning cannot take place in the absence of curiosity, and for that, one needs to keep the minds of the learners focused. An education institute with comprehensive facilities management creates and provides such an environment that promotes deep thinking.

Often, educational institutes overlook the need and importance of facilities management in running their campus smoothly. But with the ever-evolving education scenario, parents and students have extremely high expectations from an educational institute today. The present-day innovative and immersive methods of teaching demand a facility that supports and enables such methodologies and techniques.

How Educational Institutions Can Benefit from Archibus

Archibus helps the educational institutions in creating a workplace strategy that reduces operational costs by right-sizing the real-estate and integrating data and goals. The integration facilitates optimization of daily performance and forecasting needs by creating a scope of continuous improvement.

Here’s how Archibus can help:

1. Space Planning & Management
The most critical task of facilities management is to ensure optimum utilization of the available space. Poor planning and unassigned spaces inflate the maintenance costs for running and operating a facility primarily for educational institutes since most of these structures were built years ago. Archibus provides automated insights with integrated data and metrics to optimize an institution’s usage of their available portfolio while ensuring adequate attention is paid to the unique needs of the learners.

In a post-COVID world, it is likely that educational institutions will have to build in greater flexibility in their space allocation. This may mean fewer students in each class, more sessions, more parallel sections, and greater distance maintained between students to adhere to social distancing norms. Archibus would help institutions bake that flexibility into their functioning more easily.

2. Asset Management
Physical assets have a vital role to play in facilities management. An educational institute needs to build an enabling learning environment. That cannot be done without providing for adequate assets like audio-visual equipment, teaching aids immersive learning tools, and others. Such tools are essential to ensure the attention of both students and teachers. In such a distributed scenario, asset tracking is crucial. What assets are available, how much are they being used, how “usable” are they, and what is their current status, are all questions to answer. Archibus offers a complete asset management strategy to help maintain and track assets. The asset management strategy lets the management know the condition of the available assets, along with the need to provide for new assets. A sound asset management strategy can help in lowering operational costs even while improving user satisfaction.

3. Building Operations
A state-of-the-art facilities management system paves the way for the smooth running of a building. The preventive maintenance strategy in the    Archibus Facilities Management system helps in preventing costly breaks before they happen. The tracking management intimates Facilities Managers if any fault is found, or may occur, anywhere. This helps in saving time and containing any loss of teaching hours due to unplanned maintenance. The automated Preventive Maintenance Planner even lets you generate work orders automatically based on the specific maintenance need of assets, thus accelerating the process further.

4. Evaluate and Optimize
The Archibus Facilities Management system allows you to evaluate and optimize your facilities management strategy by revealing key metrics. These insights enable the tracking of costs and the performance of operational parameters across the institute. The metrics help educational institutes rectify problems, identify outliers, and determine the effectiveness of your facilities management strategy.

5. Increased Operational ROI
Optimized operations mean various opportunities to save money. For instance, the preventive maintenance plan allows you to plan for anticipatory operational costs. This not only helps you save money in the actual maintenance but also helps you plan a more realistic budget for running the facility. Funds are always a key challenge in educational institutions and better utilization of the available funds as well as the ability to better plan future funds is always useful.

6. Building Information
The most crucial thing for a facilities management plan is being able to capture and maintain a transparent and comprehensive information model of the buildings and the campus. The traditional manual way of maintaining layout information and records of a building using tools like MS Excel is non-scalable, outdated, and creates chaos. Archibus Facilities Management allows the creation of a much more evolved information model of the campus. This information model can be easily updated and kept current. This allows facilities managers to create or re-create the plan of the building – making it useful for maintenance as well as for modifications and renovations.

The Archibus Facilities Management system is a comprehensive system that optimizes the ongoing management of the built environment of your educational institute. The successful implementation of a facilities management system will put your educational institute at the forefront of innovation, and that’s what an educational system should promote. Especially in a time when the future of educational campuses and learning systems is likely to be disrupted, having a modern, flexible, and intelligent facilities management system like Archibus could mean the difference between an enabling learning environment and a campus that fails to meet the needs of the learners.