How to Improve K-12 School Facility Planning?

K-12 school facility planning is stressful, complex, and time-consuming. This is particularly true as school districts head into the start of the school year. Even more challenging is dealing with details and different organizations around maintaining health and safety amongst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.  

COVID-19 has placed an increased emphasis on the need for alterations and renovations in K-12 school buildings. Beyond the typical upkeep and general maintenance, there has been a significant escalation in HVAC work requests, increased complexity in maintaining HVAC facilities, and the need for comprehensive air quality updates.

We know that implementing your first facility management solution or switching to a new one sounds stressful. The school facility team is busy administering reactive work orders, reopening buildings to students and staff, and maintaining hygienic spaces. So why now should you consider implementing a new facility planning tool?

Let's unpack the top 3 ways software improves school facility planning!

Top 3 ways software improves K-12 school facility planning.

1. Improves Productivity 

The top way software improves K-12 school facility planning is that solutions truly make school facility planning much more manageable and far less stressful in the long term.

As you know, schools receive numerous service requests, reactive work orders, and more considerable school construction demands throughout the school year. As a result, there is always an urgent problem that needs to be solved. However, with school facility planning software in place, it is possible to transform this reactive maintenance method into a proactive and preventive maintenance methodology. 

Learn about the proven benefits of preventive maintenance.

Moving to a preventive maintenance methodology backed by a facility planning software platform allows facility teams to get ahead of larger projects. In addition, it reveals the useful life of components, thereby making it possible to optimize physical assets throughout the entire portfolio across all school buildings.

Preventive maintenance is critical for maintaining optimized operational conditions for K-12 School physical assets. This typically involves regular inspections to detect and correct defaults and repair deficiencies before a breakdown occurs.

Please read our guide to improving your preventive maintenance program.

Data is vital in helping school facility managers determine the best approach to motivating supervisors and technicians to stay on track with a high-functioning preventative maintenance program.

With The FOUNDATION Solution, K-12 school facility planners can streamline every aspect of the preventive maintenance and facility planning program, including development, scheduling, and tracking. This prevents future failures and reduces the overall downtime. Over time this will increase productivity and cut maintenance costs.

2. Improves Communication and Transparency

Information on demand when and where you need it? That's the top benefit of using mobile-first school facility planning software. It is easy to access all data about facility condition assessment, the current state of physical assets, and the valuable life of facility components. 

Mobile data-collection technology empowers school facility planners in many ways, including managing work process flows, tracking physical assets, and supervising building facilities. In addition, mobile tech helps facilities managers to communicate, collaborate, and manage workloads more efficiently.

3. Maintain Safer and Healthier Schools Now and in the Future

School buildings are places for teaching, learning, and student development. Now more than ever, maintaining the health and safety of K-12 school facilities for teachers, students, and staff, is essential. So when you aren't getting the budget, resources, or support you need, no one is as aware of your schools' deficiencies. And that adds stress. 

The appropriate school facility planning software enables schools to meet goals within constrained budgets and with limited resources. By tracking assets, data from condition assessments, and preventive maintenance schedules in one spot, it is possible to improve the efficiency of limited resources and take a strategic approach to maintain schools.

School facility planning software improves operational efficiency and provides the data you need to ensure the needs of school facilities are met and easily justified to the school board. 

Please read our guide to getting school facility projects funded.

How to Implement School Facility Planning Software

Not sure where to turn to implement these urgent updates to your school buildings? At Intellis, we have you covered with the FOUNDATION enterprise platform.

FOUNDATION simplifies capital planning by efficiently analyzing data from Facility Condition Assessment and seamlessly creates justifiable Capital Plans. In addition, the FOUNDATION platform seamlessly integrates into your systems to efficiently align funding to the school district's long-term capital plan.

Read the Case Study about how NYC schools used FOUNDATION to improve their capital planning. 

Intellis can help transform how you collect and manage data from facility condition assessments and empower you to develop justifiable capital plans to improve school buildings and campus facilities.

Our software will help you justify your budgets and prioritize projects with more intelligent and more accurate asset data so that your campus facilities will be more sustainable, safer, and accessible, thus improving the student experience.

With more accurate data, it is easier to prove your capital assets are essential to enhancing the cross-campus environments for teaching, learning, living, and research; donors and grant holders will be proud to contribute support.

Intellis software improves school facility planning:

• Decrease downtime and improve maintenance backlog.
• Identify high-priority projects ranked against industry benchmarks. 
• Generate data-rich reports for funding proposals.
• Align with the school district or university’s mission and budget
• Develop an actionable multi-year, strategic, and justifiable capital improvement plan based on intelligent data and insights. 

Learn more about how Intellis can help you navigate a smooth course for the future of K-12 School Facilities, schedule a demo with us today!