City of Philadelphia

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Established in 1951, the City of Philadelphia's Department of Public Property is a critical support agency responsible for managing and maintaining the physical infrastructure of one of the country's oldest cities. The size of this infrastructure is immense—made up of everything from city buildings to priceless artwork and prominent landmarks. The Department of Public Property supports all of it.

Specifically, the Department oversees and carries out the acquisition, disposition, lease, design, construction, renovation, and maintenance of Philadelphia properties and the management of its communications systems. The Department also administers Philadelphia's cable television franchises and coordinates special events across the City. Most importantly, the Department cares for the architectures that house government officials and the operations that service the more than 1.5 million citizens of the City of Philadelphia.

The Goal
The Department sought to improve the overall quality of service it provides and increase the effectiveness and speed of its operation. To help achieve these goals, officials set their sights on two areas. First, they needed to improve their facilities management capabilities and create a more efficient way to manage the properties and assets of Philadelphia that are in their care. Second, they wanted the information related to the maintenance of those properties and assets to tie into the City's "City Net," a wide-area enterprise network that provides city-wide data communications to all city departments and agencies. They believed that an integrated, technology-based enterprise asset management system could make this vision and its objectives a reality.

Challenges
To begin the process of selecting vendors and move forward with the project, the Department had to get the buy-in of all the appropriate parties in regards to resources and funds. Moreover, the implementation of any system had to come with the assurance that current operations would not be disrupted, as the Department could not afford to be "down" for any length of time. Finally, the City needed to be in compliance with a series of government standards and regulations, such as GASB 34, so information related to each facility, property, and asset had to be accurate and current. Such data existed in an outdated proprietary and cumbersome system, making it difficult to meet service objectives and comply with government regulations.

Solution
The Department saw an integrated technology solution as the means to uniting the various divisions within the Department. To help with this effort, the Department turned to Datastream and its suite of award-winning enterprise asset management solutions—solutions that have been successfully deployed within government agencies across the country. Datastream and its partner, IBM Global Services, designed, developed, and implemented the system.

The Department uses Datastream software to get a "bird's eye" view of the assets under its jurisdiction, such as equipment, telephone extensions, electrical parts, hardware, light bulbs, and actual facilities, to name a few. The system even helps track labor—the number of hours a department staff member spends on a given project. Management then uses this information to identify areas that need additional attention and ensure the efficiency of the organization.

Now, when a city employee calls into the Department's help desk, the call coordinator logs in to the system to create a task. Upon review, that task gets turned into a work order, which can then be tracked, followed up, and reported on. All of this happens via Datastream's asset management system.

The integrated solution is being rolled out in two phases. The first phase, which is already complete, involved deploying the system across two of the Department's largest divisions: the Division of Communications and the Division of Building Services. These groups maintain such facilities as City Hall and the Triplex office buildings, among others. These structures are major landmarks within the metropolitan Philadelphia area. For example, the ten-story City Hall building alone is made up of 900 rooms and has 20 elevators. And the Triplex office complex houses the Criminal Justice Center, the Municipal Services Building, and the One Parkway Building.

The second phase, which is currently underway, will deploy Datastream software across another major government structure-the state-of-the-art, 2,000-bed, maximum-security Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility (CFCF).

In each of these cases, the system provides the Department’s staff with a host of capabilities to help them better maintain each property. These capabilities include:

• A single, consolidated view of what is occuring within the Department;
• Preventive maintenance to protect and preserve each facility;
• The ability to submit work orders for immediate processing and attention;
• Efficient electronic processes that reduce the volume of costly and error-prone paperwork;
• Accurate historical information to educate new staff members; and
• A simple way to document information and make notations related to a given asset.

Results
Joseph James, Deputy Commissioner for the Department, states, "The Datastream solution was selected because of its simplicity and adaptability. Today, our officials and staff members have the information they need, when they need it, and in a form they can use. Over time, the Department also plans to integrate with FAMIS, the City's financial system, as well as customer relationship management technology and geographic information systems, for a single, consolidated picture of its operations."