Overview

Facing challenges resulting from changes in staff, scattered institutional knowledge, & demanding board members, Haverford College’s (Haverford) facilities & maintenance (F&M) department implemented a campus-wide Geographic Information System (GIS) framework to marry their applicable campus data with its geography. The GIS system allows Haverford to better manage, store, share, & view their spatial and facility data, resulting in better service, understanding, & decisions throughout their organization.

Solution Details

When faced with demands from internal audiences regarding Haverford’s facility data, the F&M staff recognized that a GIS tool could provide a shareable, collaborative, & scalable data platform, that could not only serve the needs of the F&M department, but could also benefit faculty, staff, student, and other departments across the campus.

To begin, a pilot project was scoped and completed prior to the entire campus’ completion, to prove the concept was attainable, and to showcase the results to secure the necessary funding. Throughout the project, we were able to couple the data collection of floor plans, room amenities, and classifications necessary for the GIS framework with a concurrent facilities condition assessment, affording Haverford certain economies of scale benefits.

With all the campus’ buildings and spaces mapped into the GIS, Haverford can now look at its spaces on a campus and/or building level, recall room demographics instantly, and much more. Furthermore, it can link and integrate data from other databases, like their facilities maintenance data, to show deficiency reports and projects within the spaces and buildings with which they are associated.

As a scalable framework, the GIS can now be programmed to incorporate additional data from other departments to benefit everyone. Haverford is also looking forward to layering other data into the GIS system, such as underground utilities, wetlands, arboretum, room scheduling, and more.

What They Said

"We finally have a tool to easily share our campus information with our peers and we are excited about future expansions; both in terms of data and users throughout our campus. Entech’s guidance throughout the process helped give us the confidence we needed to succeed."

-Director of Facilities Management