University of Tulsa: Moving to the cloud and stepping into the future with TMA

The Client

Founded in 1894, the University of Tulsa (TU) currently provides its 3,705 students with 66 bachelor’s, 28 master’s, and 15 doctoral programs. The highest rank-holding private university in Oklahoma is also responsible for managing the famous Gilcrease Museum through a unique agreement with the City of Tulsa.

PROJECT BACKGROUND AND CHALLENGES

When Sue Anna Miller joined TU as Associate Director of Facilities Management in 2019, the university’s IT team was relying solely on its on-premise infrastructure to host and run its facilities maintenance management systems. This was a known challenge to the Sue Anna. During her stint in a previous higher education facility, she had witnessed a similar situation.

Though at a much smaller scale, TU’s existing legacy systems created several issues for the IT team. There was ambiguity with servers and a lack of a clear understanding of the on-premises access control. This made it difficult for the IT team to determine access to the database after an employee left the organization.

We decided to move to the cloud for two reasons: we can always stay on the latest version and troubleshooting issues is much faster when the database is accessible anywhere.

- Sue Anna Miller, Associate Director of Facilities Management, The University of Tulsa

A CLOUD-HOSTED SOLUTION

Experience told Sue Anna that the path to resolving the IT woes of her facilities maintenance department lay in a necessary migration from the on-premise set-up to a cloud-hosted infrastructure. Wary of implementation issues and UX problems from a cloud transition in her previous workplace, she knew she could count on TMA to be a comprehensive, reliable technology partner.

After a seamless implementation of WebTMA’s cloud-hosted solution, Sue Anna and her team tapped into essential features of the robust product, including detailed reporting, work order management and development of a preventive maintenance program. The resource-driven approach of the platform eliminated TU’s need to spend on personnel and database administration.

The reporting functionality included canned reports that were organized and categorized in a way that made it easy to adopt and analyze for insights. Most importantly to her team, the WebTMA’s friendly, consistent user interface (UI) made it easier for TU to identify, develop, implement, and track KPIs.

THE SaaS ADVANTAGE FOR TU:

• Access to latest version of the solution
• Immediate availability to database for faster troubleshooting
• Reduced maintenance and personnel costs
• No additional cost of integration through StarRez integration
• Data connectivity across siloed functions
• Ability to leverage a seamless support framework

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