Driving Excellence with Estates and Facilities Service ManagementSet in a historic student city, Oxford Brookes is one of the UK’s leading modern universi-ties that enjoys an international reputation for teaching excellence and innovation.

The university’s Estates and Facilities Management (EFM) organisation plays a critical role in supporting its 18,000 students and 3,000 staff. The team is responsible for the planning, development, and maintenance of the university estate, which includes four campuses, five large halls of residence, and providing support services to all faculties and departments.

The EFM operation was handling approximately 10,000 planned tasks per year, yet at the same time reactive maintenance had reached levels of 12,000 requests per year. These tasks could range from changing a flickering light bulb to mending a leaking tap, or handling an emergency gas leak.

The high volume of tasks only served to highlight the huge limitations of the existing EFM system, as Clare Colwell, service desk manager, estates and facilities management, Oxford Brookes University, explains: “We had a rudimentary EFM system, with a strong reliance on paper-based and manual processes. Tickets would be inputted by hand into the system, printed out for engineers and manually closed once the paper tickets had been returned.

With thousands of tickets to process every month there was a significant administrative burden on our team. We were becoming increasingly reactive and didn’t have time to take a more strategic approach to planning that would alleviate our workload in the longer term.”

The biggest criticism of the EFM systemA big problem was the lack of support for mobile workers. With more than 80 techni-cians, engineers, and maintenance professionals working across the university estate at any one time, there was no capability to update or track jobs until they were logged manually with the EFM service desk team, in person. The EFM system also offered limited functionality to report on EFM performance and SLAs set up with the university’s management.

However, the biggest criticism the EFM system faced was from the staff and students at Oxford Brookes. Whenever they raised a request or issue there was no way to track the progress of the job without making calls to the already over-burdened EFM service desk.

Customer

Oxford Brookes University

Highlights

UK university moves large estates and facilities management onto a modern, cloud-based, service management platform to accelerate service delivery and enable 60% more requests to be handled

Headquarters

Oxford, UK

Geographies

United Kingdom

Employees

3,000

Business/Industry

Higher education

“Through ServiceNow we’ve made it easy to report issues and our staff and students are actively using the platform because they know it works. ”

—Clare Colwell, service desk manager, estates and facilities

management (EFM), Oxford Brookes University

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Re-thinking Workflows to Transform EFM Service DeliveryOxford Brookes needed a single platform to bring together the delivery of all EFM services, whether that was mending a broken window or handling an emergency in a residence hall.

Dr. Bruce Norris, head of programmes and projects, IT services, Oxford Brookes University, explains: “The IT Services team had been using ServiceNow for several years and we could see obvious benefits to applying the platform to estates and facilities management. By automating workflows and focusing on the service experience, we knew we could transform EFM from a reactive to a proactive operation.”

Extensive testing of ServiceNow using real-world examples, plus a department-wide training programme, ensured the cloud-based delivery platform was fit-for-purpose from day one. The uneventful “go-live” was exactly what the team wanted—guaranteeing business as usual across the service desk.

Collaboration between the IT and EFM teams was vital to the successful rollout of ServiceNow. According to Bruce Norris, “Actively demonstrating the flexibility of the ServiceNow platform and speed of configuration was a defining moment in the trial stages. Being able to create a working demo at the end of a one-day workshop built a lot of trust between IT services and EFM, marking a move towards greater collaboration and integration between the two teams.”

Creating value through operational visibilityComplete operational visibility across the EFM organization has transformed service delivery for the EFM team and its internal customers.

Through a single view into all EFM services, managers can easily track all requests and jobs in progress, interrogate the system to identify duplicates or recurring issues, and report on the performance of the EFM operation to improve accountability to the university.

Access to real-time information is proving to be invaluable to making informed decisions, particularly for emergency or high priority situations. Using GPS tracking in conjunction with ServiceNow, the EFM service desk can identify where engineers are located and what tasks they are working on to ensure the right resource is deployed and on scene as quickly as possible.

Managing information and requests relating to the university’s five residence halls has also become much more straightforward. The ServiceNow single system of record means duplicate jobs are avoided, which was a common occurrence with multiple people reporting the same issue. On-site residence halls personnel can keep track of all reported issues without relying on updating a paper record.

Rather than seeing a reduction in the number of service requests, the EFM team at Oxford Brookes has in fact seen a 60 percent rise in reactive tasks.

But Ms. Colwell highlights that this is testament to the success of the ServiceNow approach: “The volume of requests has increased significantly and that’s incredibly positive. Through ServiceNow we’ve made it easy to report issues and our staff and students are actively using the system because they know it works. The high level of automation has ensured we can more efficiently handle the increase in demand.”

Challenges

• Slow time to resolution due to long-standing reliance on paper-based and manual processes

• Costly and time-consuming service due to high incoming call volumes to the estates and facilities service desk

• Poor customer experience due to the lack of visibility into job status for the service desk and requesters

• Unable to focus on root causes due to reactive approach to incoming requests

• Inefficient task routing due to the lack of support for mobile engineers and technicians

• No insight into service delivery performance due to lack of management information and reporting functionality

• Multiple issues overlooked as problems were not reported due to the manual burden of raising a ticket

Solution

• ServiceNow Field Service Management

• ServiceNow Project Portfolio Management

• ServiceNow Performance Analytics

Results

• Increased productivity, enabling the service desk to handle a 60% rise in tickets

• Greater volume of requests processed means more hidden issues are being resolved

• Accelerated service delivery through the elimination of paper-based and manual workflows

• Proactive approach to planning renewals and maintenance work

• Complete visibility on the status of work and the progress of requests

• Ability to report on service delivery performance and its contribution to the wider organisation

Oxford Brookes University Case Study

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Intelligent insights to inform decision makingUsing ServiceNow Performance Analytics, the EFM team is able to understand, measure, and report on its performance and contribution to the university.

Managers can run a range of standard reports or create custom reports on multiple data points and key performance indicators (KPIs), such as number of incoming requests, time to resolution, and utilization of engineer time.

Clare Colwell says, “Our maintenance managers are very impressed with the analytics and reporting capabilities of ServiceNow. The information is live and it delivers the information they really want. We have a powerful set of data and analysis that is proving to be critical not only in how we manage the EFM organization, but in demonstrating our value to the wider institution.”

Ms. Colwell welcomes the greater transparency that the ServiceNow analytics delivers and has put in place updated service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure the EFM organi-sation is accountable for the delivery of tangible benefits to the university.

A Continuous Development ExperienceThe EFM team at Oxford Brookes is now embarking on phase two of its EFM transfor-mation. This includes integrating floor plan visualisations to help users see is an issue has already been reported or to raise a request simply by clicking on the map. However, the focus of phase 2 is to move additional staff onto ServiceNow, improve the customer use of the service catalogue, and fully integrate asset information into workflows.

The flexibility of the ServiceNow platform is critical to enabling this continuous devel-opment, as Bruce Norris explains: “The problem with most software implementations is that organisations rely on the technology and not the processes. ServiceNow stands apart from other platforms, allowing us to develop an EFM system around the work-flows that are specific to our requirements. We have the benefits of an ‘out-of-the-box’ solution, with the flexibility for rapid application development and a continuous upgrade path to keep us at the forefront of technology advances.”

Ms. Colwell adds, “Our vision is to create an EFM service desk that reflects the universi-ty’s commitment to excellence and innovation and ServiceNow is enabling us to deliver on that. We have already seen significant benefits but I know we have only scratched the surface of what is possible.”

“Our vision is to create an estates and facilities management (EFM) ser-vice desk, that reflects the university’s commit-ment to excellence and innovation. ServiceNow is enabling us to deliver on that. We have already seen significant benefits but I know we have only scratched the surface of what is possible.”

— Clare Colwell, service desk manager, estates and facilities management, Oxford Brookes University

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Oxford Brookes University Case Study