Quick Facts The General Services Department needed a consolidated asset management system to replace two legacy systems. Selected Datastream 7i from pool of 50 candidates based on Web architecture, history of successful deployments and impeccable customer references.

Background
With nearly 1 million residents, San Jose is the third largest city in California and the 10th largest in the United States. Its municipal government is responsible for the management of nearly 2 million square feet of office space and public facilities, as well as hundreds of parks and athletic facilities across the city.

The 235 employees comprising San Jose’s General Services Department’s Facilities Management and Parks Maintenance Divisions are responsible for managing these expansive and varied facilities, which include government offices, community centers, arenas, athletic fields, public gardens and parks, and more. These employees have a high standard to meet: San Jose’s outstanding facilities and parks are largely responsible for the city’s current ranking in Money Magazine as the fifth best place to live in America.

San Jose is also ranked as the safest large city in America. Obviously this is due in large part to the work of the city’s law enforcement agencies. However, General Services plays a major role in fostering a safe environment, because well maintained cities are inherently safer than poorly maintained ones.


The Goal
The City of San Jose operates under an over-arching program designed to deliver optimal services to citizens. Called “Investing in Results,” the program focuses municipal departments on four key performance metrics: cost, cycle time, customer satisfaction and quality.

In its initial attempt to deliver on these principles, in the 1990s San Jose’s General Services Department implemented two computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS): one to drive its facility-management operations and another to manage its parks-maintenance operations. While these systems provided some incremental improvement over the old paper-based methods of managing work processes, they did not provide the functionality, or the stability, for the department to effectively manage its costs and cycle times. They also could not provide a consolidated view of maintenance data across all facilities and parks, because the systems operated off separate databases. Nor did the systems provide the capability to capture data on customer satisfaction and quality of work.

Thus, in 2001 the department set forth to implement a new enterprise asset management system that could consolidate all of its facilities management and parks maintenance operations under a single application. It wanted to be able to “drill down” into its operational data to get accurate, real-time information on maintenance costs at the asset level. And, it wanted a product that was stable and did not crash all the time. Finally, it wanted a product from a financially sound company that would “be there” for the city as its needs changed in the future.

The Challenge
The General Services Department must manage an enormously varied array of assets. The assets under its purview range from playground equipment and athletic turf, to electrical infrastructure, HVAC systems, plumbing, fire equipment and so on. Thus, the City of San Jose needed an asset management system that was flexible and scalable enough to effectively manage the work processes around a wide variety of assets.

Additionally, the system needed to be able to manage the activities of the 235 employees in the Facilities Management and Parks Maintenance Divisions. This involves everything from issuing work orders to providing the functionality required to see work orders through to completion, while capturing all labor and equipment costs incurred along the way. This is the only way the department could gain the type of insight into its operations that it needed to meet the goals set forth in the Investing in Results program.

And finally, the system needed to be able to accommodate multiple widely distributed end-users and give them the flexibility to access the system directly from the facilities themselves, without requiring an undue amount of attention from the city’s information technology department. Thus, the solution needed to be Web-architected and mobile-enabled.

The Solution
After an extensive evaluation process that started with 50 vendors and ended with a “final round” featuring the top-three asset management systems used in the municipal government sector, the City of San Jose selected the Datastream 7i™ Asset Performance Management solution.

As a highly scalable Web-architected solution, Datastream 7i provided the robust functionality required to manage the hundreds of facilities and thousands of assets under the control of the General Services Department, as well as the inventory supporting the department’s operations.

The product provides the flexibility for employees to access the application from any building with Internet connectivity, and its mobile capabilities further enable employees to access and capture data at the point of service. Datastream’s extensive record of deployment success gave the City of San Jose the assurance it needed that Datastream would be able to deliver on its promises.

“Datastream’s company stability, customer references and record of superb service were all critical factors in our ultimate decision,” said Randal Turner, Deputy Director of the General Services Department. “It became clear to us that Datastream 7i is a flexible, cutting-edge product backed by outstanding support, which is why Datastream rose to the top during our vendor evaluation process.”

Today, the system provides a consolidated solution that drives operations across all of the city’s facilities and parks. This provides employees with universal access to up-to-date asset data, enabling them to make better decisions that result in lower operations costs, higher quality work and better utilization of resources.

Results
The Datastream 7i deployment has enabled the City of San Jose’s General Services Department to standardize its maintenance process across all facilities, parks and assets. Standardization means that best practices can be implemented across all functional areas of the organization, and that consistent data is being entered into the system across all of its operations. The General Services Department can then use this data to track and audit its operations costs and cycle times. This capability enables General Services to deliver on the guidelines of the Investing in Results program. 

“Datastream did an excellent job both during the implementation phase, with its integration and consulting services, and during the initial deployment, with its training programs,” Turner said. “As a result, our people were ready to be up and running with Datastream 7i the moment the system went live.”

Turner said that Datastream 7i’s configurability has enabled his group to customize the application to match his department’s business processes. “Applications are nothing more than the automation of business processes. This makes configurability important – because if you can’t configure your application to match your processes, you wind up having to change your processes to match the application,” he said. “Datastream 7i’s workflow tool provides a tremendous amount of flexibility, enabling us to configure Datastream 7i so it supports and automates all of our existing processes.”

The deployment has enabled General Services to meet all four of the criteria behind the Investing in Results Program:

• Costs — Because Datastream 7i automatically captures the time, materials and associated costs of every operation, General Services can now gain an extremely accurate measure of its operating costs. This data enables the organization to make more informed decisions on resource allocation and utilization, which results in reduced overall costs.
• Cycle Time — Datastream 7i’s ability to track work orders from “cradle to grave” enables General Services to capture precise data on cycle times for virtually any kind of activity – from mowing the athletic fields to replacing light bulbs. This data provides valuable management information for measuring organizational performance.
• Customer Satisfaction — Faster cycle times and more efficient resource utilization results in greater customer satisfaction. If there is a problem with any of the facilities in the City of San Jose, residents know that the problem will be fixed quickly and properly, without wasting any taxpayer dollars. The General Services Department is currently extending the functionality of its Datastream 7i deployment so it will be able to capture customer satisfaction data right in the system. This will enable the department to measure and maintain customer satisfaction levels.
• Quality — Datastream’s ability to manage the entire work-order lifecycle ensures that problems are being fixed properly and in a timely manner. Furthermore, the Web architecture makes data readily available to workers whenever they need it. This means faster and better decisions, and higher quality work. As with customer satisfaction, the General Services department is currently working to extend its Datastream 7i deployment so it can capture quality data as well.

Datastream 7i not only enables the City of San Jose to meet its Investing in Results objectives, but it also provides the functionality to actually track and report on the four key metrics of the program. As a result, Datastream 7i improves operations for General Services, drives down costs, and provides the infrastructure required for the department to meet its overarching mission.

“As a maturing facilities management organization, we believe partnering with experienced vendors capable of supporting our growing organization is vital to our long-term success,” Turner said. “Datastream 7i provides the infrastructure to support our efficient growth far into the future. From sales to service and support, our experience with Datastream has been outstanding in every respect.”