The Client

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides services for more than 8,000 undergraduate students. WebTMA is used by the University Housing and manages a little over 3.75 million square feet in 122 buildings, including apartment complexes, dining facilities, residential halls, and warehouses. Founded more than 150 years ago, it maintains a valued position as #13 overall in US public universities.

Project Background and Challenges

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign didn’t fully realize the power of TMA’s CMMS product despite their early implementation date in 1994. Using one dimension of its functionality, as only a maintenance work order system, they realized that they could expand its use to enable the university housing team to track maintenance data and make overall better operational decisions.

In October of 2012, the University’s IT Technical Associate, Graham Houser, further modernized their use of TMA’s product suite. He worked with a team to move the university’s operations off TMA’s desktop application to TMA’s browser-based solution, WebTMA. Despite the success of that massive upgrade, Graham still knew that they could further improve and optimize the department’s use of the software to save time, money and resources.

Configuring Dashboards

While the housing department had broadened WebTMA’s use, they still had a bare bones solution. Soon after the implementation, Graham attended his first TMA User Conference and learned the massive scope of functionality that WebTMA had to offer.

Leveraging the Executive Dashboards module was the first step in configuring the product to better meet the university’s needs. From supervisors to trades technicians, each tab on the housing team’s dashboards was modified to track and summarize both current and outstanding work by department. The easy-to-read data visualization of graphs and charts increased efficiency by providing more clarity to the entire team.

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Optimizing with Mobility

The obviously advantages gleaned from the use of Executive Dashboards opened the door for Graham and his colleagues to bring their unused mobile licenses back into the conversation. They speculated that a mobile offering could simplify their daily operations.

They began with five mobile licenses and the move to mobility almost immediately transformed the way the team and technicians managed their maintenance tasks and processes. Now accessing work orders anytime and anywhere, the tradespeople could prioritize their tasks without returning to a physical location to record their time and labor. WebTMA became the single location for all work requests, giving more visibility across inter-departmental university operations, in turn, enabling more informed decision-making.

With technicians no longer tethered to a centralized office, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign teams were able to exponentially increase their average annual work order count to 38,000 and save on resources. Leveraging TMA’s mobility suite, the Housing Department proved their theory repeatedly; from cost-savings on physical materials like cases of paper and office supplies to reduced charges on driving across campus and waiting times for supervisor sign off. A flexible application configured to meet the university’s needs paired with time and vision from the users themselves, WebTMA helped to reshape the facilities team’s processes and their approach to daily operations.