Business Plan. for. Executive Sponsor Kristi Beeks, Associate Dean for Finance and Administration College of Health Professions

Transcription

1 Business Plan for Asset Management System Executive Sponsor Kristi Beeks, Associate Dean for Finance and Administration College of Health Professions Customer College of Health Professions Presented by Dusti Annan Coultas, Director of Educational Technology College of Health Professions Jim Moore, Senior Information Technology Consultant College of Health Professions 2/7/2007 1:15 MMARY

2 Executive Summary Contributing enormously to the identity of the MUSC College of Health Professions are the state-of-the-art facilities and technological capabilities that set it above other institutions of education for health care professions. Over the past several years, the College of Health Professions has seen a substantial growth in facilities and equipment. Now, with over 800 faculty members, staff members, students, the College is comprised of three buildings totaling over 70,000 square feet for teaching, administration, and research. The College houses and supports its own state-of-the-art labs, classrooms, and conference rooms (approximately 20 rooms) that are equipped with advanced media and technology, including Smartboards, LCD projectors, video cameras, integrated A/V, Sympodia, computers, microphones, automated projector screens, and touchscreen control panels. Additionally, College personnel support and manage a Master Control room, teleconferencing equipment, smart classroom technology and equipment, simulation equipment, and research labs. However, the College is still using the same systems that were developed in-house almost ten years ago to manage and track equipment, systems, and assets. As a result of the College s growth and expansion, more sophisticated and uniform systems and reporting tools are needed to manage the college s growing volume of facilities and equipment. In particular, an asset management system is needed to simplify and integrate the complex managing and tracking of the College s assets. An asset management system would allow for the integration and improved management of critical data including lease cycles, warranty end cycles, service agreement data, asset assignments, depreciation cycles, vendor information, location of assets, preventative maintenance schedules, space assignments, and inventories of parts and supplies. The system needs to be able to support use from and sharing of data by stakeholders in both the Information Technology (IT) and Business Management departments within the College. Additionally, the system will need to include a web-based IT or College facilities service requests module that can be used by all faculty, staff or students within the college to submit support requests. The web-based help request module must integrate with other modules of the system such as preventative maintenance schedules, asset tracking, and labor and cost tracking. The ability to create and run reports is a must as the College will be heavily utilizing the system and will need some method of pulling the data that we are tracking. Supporting the MUSC Strategy The purchase of an asset management system goes hand-in-hand with the MUSC pillar goals of Service, People, Quality, Finance, and Growth. The objectives of purchasing an asset management systems are to reduce costs associate with redundancy of work effort and misinformation, improve the service to CHP faculty, staff, and students, support normal growth of the College, and improve the quality of tracking, management, and storage of vital information related to college assets. Key Stakeholders CHP Finance and administration team Document Last Saved: 10/24/ :28:00 AM Page 2 of 10

3 CHP IT Team Goals & Objectives Improve quality, productivity, and reliability Reduce redundancy, work effort or misinformation as a result of using multiple in-house systems to track data Improve sharing of data between College stakeholders (Business Management, IT, etc) Enable real-time reporting on location, assignment, performance, and health of equipment, systems, or other assets Improve overall organization and tracking of maintenance and support activities Track work order history to allow for more efficient distribution of labor Allow for more efficient use of facilities, rooms, and other spaces Improve efficiencies by using a web-based asset management software to allow for updating of records from any computer at any location Reduce or avoid costs Reduce or anticipate equipment breakdowns Reduce theft/loss of equipment and other assets Schedule preventive maintenance on classroom, lab, and conference room technologies Improve budget projections Reduce vulnerability associated with using current outdated, nonintegrated, multiple software systems Improve tracking of inventory costs (i.e. referencing last purchase price for budgeting, reduction of unnecessary inventory) Support normal growth Replace systems created in-house that are passed end-of-life support and that are vulnerable to failure Effectively manage an increasing volume of technology, equipment, and assets Improve service Streamline communication between College requesters (faculty, staff, and students) and Business Management/IT personnel Provide status updates to college requestors Current Environment Currently, the support and management of the College s facilities, equipment, and technology resources is a manual and time-consuming process. The College Business Manager and IT personnel currently manage and track most College equipment or other assets and use numerous, nonintegrated systems for this work. These systems include: Document Last Saved: 10/24/ :28:00 AM Page 3 of 10

4 Filemaker web-accessible help call system used by IT: Currently, the College utilizes a help call system created using Filemaker to facilitate faculty, staff, and student requests for general IT, classroom, or A/V support. This Filemaker system was created in-house and is almost ten years old. The current system does not support status updates, requests for more information, and notifications of completion of support calls, which are performed separately by the IT department using Outlook or phone calls. Additionally, this system does not integrate with the separate systems the College currently uses to track maintenance, lease cycles, assignments and location, etc., which results in duplication of effort. Access database: An Access database is used by the IT department to track computer and equipment lease cycles, computer and equipment assignments, and maintenance schedules and equipment repairs. This data is manually entered and does not integrate with the College s current help system. Dell s web-based system to order warranty parts and track lease and warranty info: Currently, the College of Health Profession provides leased Dell computers to all faculty, staff, and students. These computers are under warranty and the Dell web-based warranty system is used to place calls about warranty repair work conducted by the College IT personnel. This system does not integrate with either the help call system or Access database. Consequently, College IT personnel use three separate systems for requesting repair and managing repair and maintenance performed on College leased equipment. This invites substantial amount of duplication of effort and opportunity for error. Excel spread sheets: Currently, the College s Business Manager and IT personnel use separate Excel spread sheets to manage lease schedules of equipment, location of equipment, and asset assignments. Tracking information on the excel spreadsheet is a manual process and often leads to duplication of effort and misinformation between business managers, IT, and other stakeholders. Outlook calendars and Outlook calendars are used to schedule and track projects and resource utilization. Outlook is used to respond to service request or update faculty, staff, and students on the status of their request. Filemaker database to track equipment and assets used by Finance team: Currently, the College s finance team uses a Filemaker database created in-house to track any assets, in addition to using Excel spreadsheets to track other equipment information. Most of these systems were created in-house by members of the CHP IT Team, are passed end-of-life support, and are vulnerable to failure. Future Environment An asset management system would allow for the integration and improved management of critical data including lease cycles, warranty end cycles, asset assignments, depreciation cycles, vendor information, location of equipment, preventative maintenance schedules, and inventories of parts and supplies. Improvements in the management of this data will result in reduction of loss, theft or damage and reduction in money spent on extended lease periods beyond the lease end cycle. Maintenance Connection would also be used as a preventative maintenance tool for all IT, computer, A/V, and facilities equipment. Additionally, use of an asset management system by Finance and Administration would result in better maintenance of and more Document Last Saved: 10/24/ :28:00 AM Page 4 of 10

5 appropriate, cost-effective use of facilities, rooms, and other spaces. Additionally, data currently residing in the College s various databases and systems used to store asset and help call related information could be integrated, stored and accessed through one asset management system. Specifically, a commercial asset management system would allow for the following: General View a summary of work orders, PMs, inventory or purchase orders. View all work orders in one screen for a snapshot of work load and requests. Record locking function where one persons record cannot be overwritten if the same record is opened by two people. Ability to easily find data using user-defined searches, sorts and filters. Ability to manage multiple buildings or locations Track Equipment/Locations Ability to view assets and locations in a hierarchical or graphical view Auto-generate equipment IDs based upon user-defined criteria Track general information such as serial number, model, manufacturer, vendor, purchase date, warranty, insurance information, replacement cost, associated contracts, etc. Ability to classify or set general specifications for assets or groups of assets. Define maintenance areas to automatically assign work orders for individual assets Ability to link equipment to inventory Ability to include an image of each piece of equipment Ability to manually set downtime for any machine and quickly pull up the downtime history Ability to link documents to equipment (CAD drawings, text documents, spreadsheets, maps, procedures, etc) Quick view of work history for each piece of equipment. Manage Work Order An easy-to-use web-based interface for faculty, staff, students Separation of work orders by user-defined types and priorities Workflow can be set up to control approvals and authorization levels Ability to update work orders to reflect Requested, Assigned, Issued, Closed, Denied, On-Hold and Cancelled Automatically number work orders Allow external service requester to make requests or view the status of their request Ability to assign multiple employees and/or contractors to one work order Flags to indicate equipment as requiring shutdown, lockout/tag-out or under warranty Define sub-tasks to be completed on a work order. Ability to track failed work orders and the reason for failure Track both estimated and actual work order labor and material costs Ability to include external documentation to support work order Ability to group work orders by project and print consolidated work order summary Work order printout allows future conversion to bar coding system Document Last Saved: 10/24/ :28:00 AM Page 5 of 10

6 Automatically associate costs with work orders Full work order list easily accessible and ability to search, filter and sort work orders Preventative Maintenance (PM) Ability for equipment to share PM schedules to avoid duplicating data Defined maintenance schedules by day, month, week, year Option to have the system auto-generate work orders a user-defined number of days in advance. Option to manually generate work orders from PM schedule Option to automatically assign selected PMs to specific employees Allow the input of data from subsystems. Inventory parts and equipment Spare parts can be stored in one or multiple locations. Associate parts/equipment with location information Ability to generate a parts catalog by type of part, vendor with yearly usage to facilitate blanket contract negotiation Ability to notify manager when parts in individual stock rooms fall below restock points. Purchase order can be created to order new parts Ability to store last price paid for each item and calculates average price paid over time Ability to store multiple vendor information for each inventory item Ability to support a cross-referencing between inventory and assets to display where each inventory item is being used. Ability to manually update inventory quantities. Customizable Reporting Ability to create user-defined reports. Criteria can be modified on the fly for each report Sort, filtering, layout and graphical information can be changed on reports Reports can be printed, ed, and exported Users can define custom groups for their own reports Reports can be set up to group and/or total selected columns of data Ability to develop reports showing difference in costs associated with preventive, corrective and emergency work orders. Asset reports can show maintenance costs rolled up by location. Ability to view multiple reports at one time. Security/Authorization Security authorization may be customized and configured by system function. Only display relevant data that individual user has access to view. Require authentication before accessing the software to track individual usage. Ability to see who is online at any given time. Ability to keep an audit trail of all records created, modified and deleted. Document Last Saved: 10/24/ :28:00 AM Page 6 of 10

7 Interfaces Use of an asset management system by CHP will require interfacing with OCIO-IS on the tie-in to LDAP/Active Directory. CHP would want to authenticate current faculty, staff, and student user information into the asset management system. Solution Alternatives 1. Continue using existing in-house systems If the college were to continue using in-house systems, the expanding volume of the College s facilities and equipment requires that substantial upgrades on these systems be performed in order to manage existing and future data. The College would need to update software, acquire database and programming training, update databases, acquire more server space and train users. We would need to continue making improvements and upgrades to this system each year. 2. Purchase a commercial asset management system The College of Health Professions has considered a number of alternatives for commercial asset management systems. We have reviewed many different asset management software, including: NetSimplicity Visual Asset Manager Enterprise Web Work CMMS by Tero Numara software XAssets EWorkOrders Express Metrics Maintenance Connection From review of these vendors, CHP stakeholders have determined that Maintenance Connection best meets the College s needs. 3. TMA At the request of the OCIO Technology Oversight Committee, we reviewed TMA, a maintenance system used by the Facilities and Engineering department at MUSC. We concluded that piggybacking on Facilities and Engineering in using this software would not meet our needs for the following reasons: Facilities and Engineering has no infrastructure to support the use of TMA by another campus entity like CHP. We believe that Facilities and Engineering does not have the time or resources to dedicate to our scope of work. Given that using TMA could still cost CHP at least $10K in licensing (and more in customizations and training), CHP would like to invest in a product that can be used by our College without reliance on another MUSC entity. Reporting is not customizable. Currently, Facilities and Engineering uses an in-house Access database to extend the reporting features of TMA to meet their needs. CHP would need to create an Access database as well instead of using built-in reporting. This is not an improvement on our current reporting capabilities. The system is not currently outside the campus firewall. This is essential for our offcampus users and this customization is not necessary for Facilities and Engineering. Document Last Saved: 10/24/ :28:00 AM Page 7 of 10

8 Any field changes CHP would want to make to the major layout would impact Facilities and Engineering s use of the system. This which will limit what we can change or customize. We would like to be able to have the option to customize whatever product we need to fit our specific needs. There is no authentication currently into Active Directory. Someone would have to upkeep the 700+ active user ID s that CHP would need to maintain. Loading the system with new IDs would have to occur whenever new faculty/staff are employed and whenever new students begin. We are concerned that we may not get the support we need to make this happen within an acceptable period of time. Additionally, SQL scripting would have to be done for data uploads. TMA does not track requests by user. Instead, it tracks request by Request #. In order for our users to look up the status of their request, they will need to look up their request by number, via the web interface. This is a usability feature that is not an improvement on our current system. We would like to have a system that allows for more direct communication with our users. Recommendations Given the alternatives, we recommend purchasing a commercial asset management system in order to achieve our goals and objectives. After review of a number of vendors, we have determined that one in particular Maintenance Connection best meets our needs. Implementation PROJECT RESPONSIBILITIES ROLE NAME DEPT TITLE Executive Sponsor Kristi Beeks Finance and Administration, CHP Champion Dusti Annan Coultas Information and Educational Technology, CHP Project Manager Jim Moore Information and Educational Technology, CHP Associate Dean for Finance and Administration, CHP Director of Educational Technology, CHP Senior Information Technology Consultant, CHP IT Contact Jim Moore (same as above) (same as above) Timeline The implementation of an Asset Management solution at CHP could be completed within two months. Implementation would include harnessing of current data, data conversion, training, and creation of help documents. Document Last Saved: 10/24/ :28:00 AM Page 8 of 10

9 Financial Impact Summary Resource hours for continued use of in-house systems One Time Annual OCIO-IS 0 0 CHP IT/other CHP personnel Resource for Asset Management System: One Time Annual OCIO-IS 40 7 CHP IT/Other CHP personnel Resource for TMA One Time Annual OCIO-IS CHP IT/Other CHP personnel MUSC Facilities and Engineering Software Costs Implementation Costs Annual Fee Five Year Cost Continued use of in-house systems $10000 $5000 $35000 Asset Management Software $65,000 $5200 $86000 TMA $10000 $6000 $40000 Return on Investment Return on investment was calculated using software and resource hours for implementing an asset management system (see BusinessPlanFinancialFormat.xls). We believe an asset management system could significantly reduce the manpower or other costs associated with the following: Help calls (approx. 35 IT help calls/week) Data entry Error checking Report generation Vendor information tracking Document Last Saved: 10/24/ :28:00 AM Page 9 of 10

10 Preventive maintenance Reduction in theft/loss Conducting physical inventories We anticipate that over the course of 5 years, the return on investment will be no less than 282%. Document Last Saved: 10/24/ :28:00 AM Page 10 of 10