Last week, our leadership team was welcomed to the National Association of College and University Business Officers Annual Meeting in Long Beach, California. The NACUBO Annual Meeting is the education industry’s largest and best-attended event for college and university business officers and provided a great opportunity for the Intellis team to share ideas with higher education leaders.
CEO at Intellis Steven Warshaw at the NACUBO annual meeting.
We learned that the biggest concern among higher education business and facilities professionals is the issue of limited budgets: Do more with less while making your university its best! Yet, such funding cuts make the need to budget time, money, and workforce strictly more urgent than ever.
The good news, though, is that Intellis' innovative technologies and platforms in facility management software help universities and colleges work smarter and more efficiently. Whether the educational institution is growing in enrollments, shrinking in on-campus presence, or facing aging buildings, Intellis' platform offers an efficient, affordable, adaptable solution for facilities and business officers.
After an energizing week of conversation with higher educational professionals, Intellis can report from 2018's NACUBO Annual Meeting that these are the three hottest topics in higher educational facilities management.
Preventive and Predictive Maintenance
When faced with shrinking budgets, it’s tempting to put off general maintenance, system upgrades, or building repairs until a future budget cycle — even postpone them indefinitely until funding becomes available. However, when it comes to essential systems such as a malfunctioning HVAC unit, this approach is problematic, to say the least. Are students and staff shivering for the semester in inadequately heated accommodation? Doors bolted, and classes canceled for a week? Such experiences harm your bottom line, and these painful compromises stand in the way of what should be at the heart of an educational institution: learning.
This is when an effective Preventative Maintenance program can help. Procrastination is the thief of time—and money—after all. Some operations teams find themselves in reactive mode, putting off fixes that can be done today and yet rushing to repair the latest breakdown. PM is the strategy to liberate them. With this in mind, Intellis has developed The FOUNDATION Solution Platform.
With FOUNDATION'S forecast tools, analysts and planners can jump forward and backward in time to understand needs, plan progress, and budget spending at any point. FOUNDATION scenario tools help managers evaluate plan alternatives. Made for multi-site organizations, FOUNDATION can zoom in to greater detail or zoom out for system, building, site, or even city summaries.
Be Flexible: The Smart Space Solution
During his keynote, Brian C. Mitchell, Founding Partner of Academic Innovators, stated, "The single most underutilized and overlooked asset colleges have is real estate. Get creative about how and when you deploy it."
How educators and students use facilities has changed. With the rise of smaller class sizes that emphasize collaboration, there is a reduced need for traditional lecture halls. These changes have led to schools altering existing space to meet their needs. With stretched resources and the drive for cost-efficiency, institutions are repurposing underutilized spaces.
Increasingly, universities are turning to flexible spaces that can have multiple uses, such as modular spaces that are easily configurable to suit the needs of students and educators. For example, by using raised access flooring with displacement ventilation, a space can be inexpensively converted from a 40—to 50-seat classroom to five faculty offices by using movable, interchangeable wall systems. The flexibility to reconfigure space for different uses is essential in today's higher education sector.
Business Intelligence: Financial Reports and Capital Planning
Leveraging insightful data analysis and reporting was one of the year's hottest topics. Business Intelligence is your control center for working smarter, not harder. That's why we've made it our mission to empower institutions to be efficient, sustainable, and agile enough to make bold business decisions that set your organization up for long-term success. Even under strained budgets and time, with shifting regulations, priorities, and needs, our clients have continuously seen a significant return on investment—as well as improved transparency and efficiency.
In a recent Gallup survey, ninety-one percent of education business officers reported that they must routinely assess the financial health of their institutions by generating monthly financial reports that include long-term projections. These reports take a considerable amount of time to generate, not to mention the need to create reports that can be shared with diverse stakeholders across the campus, including the president's cabinet, the governing board, and the finance committee.
Our FOUNDATION capital planning software makes generating and sharing reports fast and easy! With FOUNDATION, you can swiftly aggregate data, track project progress, and create reports that can be easily shared with multiple stakeholders throughout your institution and at every level.
We know your institution wasn't founded to manage these reports constantly. Its mission is to empower young people to be their best. The less time you and your colleagues spend on tedious admin tasks, the more you can focus on delivering a top-quality student experience.
Conclusion: Leverage Technology for Efficiency
Technology should empower your team to improve efficiency and workflow. Staying updated on using data and insight tools for facilities is an easy way to cut costs. With the help of enterprise software like FOUNDATION, facility managers can leverage building data and turn it into actionable insights.
With robust, data-centric work systems tailored to your needs, you won't have to waste the opportunity to achieve more. At Intellis, we look forward to seeing the progress educational institutions make across these areas, and we’re proud to be an ally in helping higher education institutions work smarter to reach new levels of success!
Additional Resources
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A. H. Maslow (1943) "A Theory of Human Motivation." Originally Published in Psychological Review, 50, 370-396. doi:10.1037/h0054346– via psychclassics.yorku.ca.
Inside Higher Ed. "Lazy Rivers and Learning." https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/01/17/improving-value-campus-facilities-opinion.
