North-West University (NWU)
Raising the Bar: An IWMS Implementation Success Story
One of the largest residential universities in South Africa with more than 60,000 students and 1,300 buildings, required an integrated facilities management approach to improve the governance, delivery model, processes, protocols and budget management of its facilities. It achieved that with an exponential increase in facility management efficiency.
Summary
The large-scale introduction of the Planon Integrated Facilities Management System at a leading South African university institutionalised an effective and proactive system of the lodging, executing, work quality monitoring as well as cost-tracking of all maintenance work orders. This resulted in halving the work execution time, higher utilisation of facilities and providing reliable data for inventory management as well as effective budgeting for facility maintenance.
Solutions
The Challenge
South African universities face the dilemma that the annual intake of new students outpaces the rate at which National Department of Higher Education subsidies increase. The North-West University (NWU) with campuses in Potchefstroom, Mahikeng and Vanderbijlpark, realised that the more efficient management of their physical infrastructure was essential to relieving this pressure. With more than 60,000 students and more than 1,300 buildings the status quo system of facilities management was inefficient. NWU required a Facilities Strategic Optimisation Project (FSOP).
Our Solution
Following an RFP, Cohesive was selected as the provider of choice because of its deep experience in providing market-leading solutions in the Facilities & Asset Management industry and its track record in implementing Planon. Following a Gap Analysis, workshops with NWU stakeholders at a range of levels were held to showcase the functionality of Planon’s Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS). This enabled the institution to gain insight and confidence that the IWMS would assist in closing the gaps.
The NWU departments of Finance, Facilities and IT were involved in all processes. Status quo practices and institutional domains were challenged, and tough decisions workshopped with the interest of the organisation as a whole guiding each facet and phase of the process.
The system went live on 1 February 2021 with the first orders that were created. The implementation was structured in 2 releases:
- Business Release 1 involved the Rollout of Reactive Maintenance across 3 campuses with the automatic routing of various types of orders being possible through more than 500,000 rules defined to ensure more than 100 buildings were catered for.
- Business Release 2 dealt with Planned Maintenance, Condition Assessments, Lease Management and
Reservation Management which was adopted seamlessly by users who were confident and comfortable with the system due to the NWU focusing heavily on change management and an effective training strategy comprising of functional area experts and change champions.
The Client Benefits
The integration to the financial system enables the cost tracking of maintenance work performed providing extensive insight for cost control and future budgeting.
The onboarding of both class and examination timetable schedules from an NWU legacy system to Planon ensured venue utilisation could be visibly managed. This aspect of the project is known to be a world-first for Planon, given the large amount of data involved in proactively reserving venues (almost 50,000 Reservation Orders).
The capacity of the Planon application is constantly demonstrated in the NWU application thereof. Since 2021 all new buildings with all identifiable spaces have been added.
End of 2024 the beds in hostels increased by 50%. There was a 288% increase in reservable venues and a massive 685% increase in reservations. This proves the efficiency gains that have been achieved.
The system enables university staff to create service requests (desktop or mobile) for any facility-related issue that requires intervention from the Facilities Management department. The service request is automatically routed to the correct responsible party based on the information provided in the service request. The work order process enables the allocation of technical resources to attend to the problem and the requestor can monitor at any time the progress of the work. Deviations from maintenance protocols are immediately covered and reported.
The system provides the ability to manage Planned Maintenance more effectively based on the predefined maintenance schedules.
Whilst facility maintenance orders shot up by 303% to a total of 167,500 at the end of 2024, the proactive lodging of the orders with described and controllable maintenance protocols brought about massive savings in time spent on maintenance work.
Taking the 2021 average time to complete maintenance orders as the benchmark, NWU has experienced an annual
improvement in the time to complete maintenance orders. By the end of 2024, the average time has dropped by 57% against the 2021 benchmark.
In the Higher Education sector in South Africa, this IWMS at NWU was a first and it received the South African Facilities Management Association Award for The Technology Implementation of the Year in 2022.