Case Studies

Ganflec Corporation
Camp Hill, PA

Situation
In 2004, Gannett Fleming Inc. developed a comprehensive computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) Saber™ to support their clients by offering a full service approach to facilities management. The management at Gannett Fleming had committed to optimizing the operational performance of their own facilities, totaling 292,100-square-feet, by implementing Saber, which has enabled them to expand their facility management requirements. The investment in an internal implementation of Saber provides an example of Gannett Fleming's commitment to Saber.

Challenges
The current system was antiquated and adapted from an old tunnel management database application that was not designed for facilities management. The facility consisted of hundreds of existing systems that needed to be compiled into the database and maintenance procedures developed and scheduled for managing the operations. The issue being that if the facilities management group needed to manually re-build the database it would require thousands of man hours and a much larger budget to migrate out of the existing system while delaying the implementation of the new system. The Saber development team needed to create a customized migration utility to extract the critical records from the old database and map the records into the correct locations for immediate use.

Solution
The implementation of a facilities management program in an accelerated schedule would require the assistance of a highly experienced facilities consultant familiar with a diverse mix of mechanical, electrical, and instrumentation based systems. We offered to support this requirement with facilities specialists who have more than 25 years of industrial experience. The implementation also required that outsourced contracts be tracked to see that insurance renewals where maintained for these vendors. The Saber development team was able to create a customized migration utility, train the facilities staff, and successfully migrate into the new CMMS program achieving 100 percent operation within a two week time frame. The training consisted of two–day, work shops enabling the staff to start entering maintenance related data immediately.

The time table to execute such an initiative was accelerated to allow the operations staff to immediately use the product and migrate from a legacy system. The implementation of the CMMS for the facilities team allowed them to maintain facilities management requirements seamlessly and provide a much higher degree of adaptability and functionality compared to their decade old system which had very limited functionality.