Project Description
The Department of Facilities Management of the University of Texas Health Science Center At San Antonio provides services (maintenance, repair, etc) to support more than 2.8 million gross square feet of space in buildings with a staff of 315.
Challenge
The Department of Facilities Management was looking for a solution to better serve 3,000 internal clients who are submitting 6,000 work order requests per year. The goal was to reduce the volume of paper work while optimizing the response time.
Solution
The Department of Facilities Management designed a workflow with WorkflowGen to enable any of the 3,000 authorized clients from anywhere on the campus to submit a work request. Depending on the requester and the nature of the work the requests are automatically routed to the appropriate supervisor (signature authorities) for approval and then routed to the Department of Facilities Management. All the participants in this process can track the status of their request in real time (requesters, approvers, facilities management operators) via the workflow portal. Event-based email notifications enable the requestors to be notified of the request’s progress along the workflow process. The users can attach external files to the forms. Thanks to single sign-on, no separate username and password is necessary.
WorkflowGen works on an IIS web server with SQL server as a back-end database. The authentication of the participants is done automatically thanks to an LDAP connector. An integration has been developed with PeopleSoft in order to dynamically retrieve the list of approvers depending on the requester and the nature of the work. The participants use their web browser to access WorkflowGen and populate PDF forms to submit their requests.
Benefits
- Response time has been optimized from 2 days to 15 minutes. The workload for the operators in the Department of Facilities Management has been reduced dramatically and their ability to monitor and retrieve process data has been maximized. The client enjoyed both the productivity gains and the possibility to monitor their requests in real time.
- Design of the work order process with WorkflowGen took just one month. A pilot was first organized for a few selected participants before the solution was rolled out campus wide to 3,000 people by sending a simple email.
- The Department of Facilities Management was able to design the workflow without programming except for the integration with PeopleSoft and LDAP. No training was required for the end users who where able to access a user guide if needed directly on the Department of Facilities Management web site.