A well-designed maintenance program maximizes resources and prevents waste

In 2020, the school underwent a large-scale expansion of buildings and facilities, but the mobile solutions weren’t up to par with the proposed changes. The Facilities Management department looked to upgrade its mobile environment with new software and reimplement the latest version of Maximo on the market. The project would give maintenance teams the ability to track asset conditions and anomalies more efficiently, using remote monitoring, putting mobile solutions in the hands of all its facilities personnel and allowing access to data when there wasn’t a network.

The team also wanted a new platform that could be customizable and allow for existing developmental tools to be incorporated. Such capabilities would ease the transition for employees without the need for additional training time to learn new tools. Cornell looked to IBM for consulting assistance with the next phase of its maintenance platform overhaul.

“We didn’t have a lot of experience in-house with implementing the new system. It was Maximo, but it wasn’t what it is today. It was still much more robust than the in-house tools we were accustomed to,” says Becraft. “We also took a lot of time to standardize names across the board, like an air handling unit. There were so many components of standardizing, and we were going to smush it all under one system title and record data. But we needed assistance understanding the granularity of what we wanted to do, as well as best practices for job plans for types of assets and resources we had.” 

With IBM’s consulting help, the Cornell team integrated legacy systems into Maximo’s latest version alongside the new mobile solution that would enable more users. A training program was set up for employees, and within a few months, the user base grew from 10 pilot users to 260.

“That was a big win for us because everything we needed to do in Maximo we could then do within the mobile solution,” explains Becraft. “It didn’t have its own separate database from Maximo; it was an extension of it.”

Benefits of Maximo on mobile devices include:

• Remote monitoring of all operations
• AI support in operations to detect anomalies
• A safer workspace for everyone
• Maintenance management—anytime, anywhere
• Increased productivity for technicians
• Enhanced knowledge for teams to better understand and act on the health of assets

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down Cornell in 2020 and the campuses were emptied of students and staff, the need for facilities management and maintenance didn’t stop. While there was offline functionality within the new system, most users had to be on campus to use it while sharing devices—but that was no longer feasible. The need to push for more Maximo licenses and mobile devices became more prominent.

Before COVID-19, not everyone within Facilities had a mobile device. Painters, for example, didn’t need access to Maximo before the pandemic. They would fill out a slip, hand it to an administrative coordinator, and their time and particular work orders would be entered. But with administrative staff off campus and unable to log hours, accurate labor reporting became harder to capture.

“When Covid hit, we didn’t have a lot of staff on campus and work logs became critical for us in understanding where someone left off on a job. Plus, with people needing to take sick leave for a long time, we needed to know where other technicians could pick up for that person,” says Kristi Cooley, an IT Manager at Cornell. “We also had to think about safety, keeping employees physically apart and no longer sharing devices.”

Access to Maximo and mobile helps technicians jump on emergencies in real time. Users can be in the field working on one thing and have access to immediate work orders coming in. They can take it on or reassign the task to someone in a better location or with more appropriate resources to do it, even if it’s a team in another zone.

“With COVID-19, we needed to take a streamlined approach to our maintenance and the different types of work that we were responsible for,” explains Becraft. “We had new leadership in our division that believed in data-driven decision-making. We needed the system to give us the answers no one else could. Leadership started looking at what was in each work order and who was assigned to that team and others. ‘Did they need to share resources? If one team had a significant backlog in one zone, could someone in another zone offer support to get them out of backlog?’”

Previously, Cornell was using Maximo as a work delivery and billing system. Now, it’s also used as a work management tool for forecasting preventative maintenance and integrating corrective maintenance and project work. The latest update, enabled by Maximo, supports 800+ service requests daily and brings efficiency and optimization. It eliminates redundant manual processes and the costly specialized perforated paper and improves customer service and support to Maximo users.

“We’ve gone completely paperless as a result of Maximo,” adds Becraft. “No one uses paper for anything related to work or maintenance projects, and we’re able to become a more high-class maintenance organization because of all the information we can keep in one system about all of the buildings and all of the systems within them.”

The administrative team can now allocate resources such as personnel needs more efficiently. What used to take five IT developers is now maintained by two, allowing the team to shift employees to other essential areas. To date, the current mobile license and device count has jumped to 377 users.

The additional cost savings, just within the inspection side of things, speak for themselves. The new environment provides a replacement for a standalone inspection solution, eliminating the need to facilitate the exchange of Maximo data to that system constantly. Maximo’s compliance and regulation components have also improved the efficiency of the university’s maintenance department.

“One of the things we’re excited about is the new inspection module from Maximo,” adds Becraft. “Just within the last six months, it has created so many efficiency and effectiveness opportunities for all our groups. We are now allowed to use Maximo instead of paper logs for reporting and the data is right down to the assets being inspected.”

Cooley adds: “Compliance is a big part of it. We have a system that can track everything we need to do for what’s required by different agencies. We have a tool that enables us to communicate at all levels of the organization and gives a level of confidence and accountability in the job. It shows what it really takes to maintain a campus.”

Moving forward, the Facilities Management department will continue to work toward fully implementing its vision and standardization across all the facilities in the organization to become a more sustainable operation. One goal is to rid the campus of material waste and to further utilize the resources already on the ground. The university plans to upgrade Maximo, enabled by AI, to help its field staff identify performance factors, improve maintenance reliability and increase asset utilization, thus reducing maintenance costs.

“We have pockets of great success, but we do have areas of improvement across the entire board. But the assets, in general, have come a long way,” says Becraft. “As for sustainability, we are working on supply chain optimization. We are using the system to help us with not having tons of materials all over the place on campus or preordering before we need it so that we have it on hand. It’s also on our roadmap to onboard more users and do more predictive maintenance. We have a new building automation system that we’d like to integrate more fully.”

Becraft goes on to say: “We often pay more attention to what we still have to do as opposed to what we’ve accomplished so far, but from the beginning to where we are now is incredible growth. What Maximo really does is give us the ability to make data-driven decisions. It has enabled us to get the proper resources to do what we need to support the university and its missions.”

Located in Ithaca, New York, Cornell (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a private Ivy League statutory land-grant research university founded in 1865. The student body comprises more than 15,500 undergraduate and 10,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries. The institution is divided into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main campus.