by Brianna Crandall — July 7, 2014—Nebraska’s Lincoln Public School system is targeting a five percent reduction in utilities use by integrating its building automation system (BAS) with its facilities management system from ARCHIBUS, Inc., pioneering provider of real estate, infrastructure, and FM software used around the world.
By integrating the online ARCHIBUS Reservations application for scheduling and tracking room use, with the BAS system, the school system’s facilities management team can track which of its many rooms are being used during the day, or by school or community groups at night, and shut down lighting systems and heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems when rooms are vacant.
The details of created reservations can be easily viewed from either the desktop or mobile devices, helping to optimize room utilization.
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With every school system in the nation attempting to wring waste out of increasingly strained budgets, Nebraska’s Lincoln Public Schools is no exception. With 64 facilities and over 7 million square feet of space under management, Nebraska’s second-largest school system has a great deal of utility consumption to analyze and reduce to meet its five percent reduction goal. Utility use overall has been rising over the last decade for the school system due, in part, to a 27 percent facilities expansion to accommodate a growing student population, as well as a 154 percent hourly increase in community use of school facilities.
The school system, with the help of ARCHIBUS Business Partner Rand Worldwide, found a technology solution to utility cost reduction through the integration of the ARCHIBUS Reservations application and the school’s building automation system (BAS).
“We originally had a paper-based reservations system and there was really no accountability with it,” says ARCHIBUS Administrator Deb Ryan. “People would fill out a piece of paper; the principal would sign off on it. They would send a copy to us. I would put it on a spreadsheet and, from the spreadsheet, Roger Buman, our HVAC assistant supervisor, would look and see what HVAC systems needed to be turned on in the buildings.”
The facilities management team, which also included Technology Coordinator Wayne Regnier, decided that for maximum control of room use and related utilities, the department needed an online reservations system that would sync with the HVAC infrastructure. The system, notes Ryan, had to be accessible anytime and from anywhere.
“Reporting on room use is now really easy,” confirms Ryan. “We can go in and look at the thousands of reservations we have each year and view them by day, by week, or by month. You just type in the time period, the name of the facility, and we know exactly what’s going on in our schools and what room configuration and HVAC services have to be activated and deactivated.”
In addition to tracking reservations for community group meetings and related liability insurance information, custodial cleaning sessions and more, the system also affords the facilities management team a great deal of programming flexibility, a significant advantage to a school system of this size.
“We have over 15,000 rooms in our 64 buildings and over 9,140 of them are currently managed with our integrated HVAC and Reservations system, but all of our buildings are submitting reservations online now—and most room configurations and set-ups are in our database, too,” says Regnier. “The rest of our rooms will be online soon. At that point, we’ll have the infrastructure we’ll need to reach our five percent utility reduction goal.”
Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, ARCHIBUS, Inc. has pioneered computer-aided infrastructure and facilities management technologies since 1982. With ARCHIBUS, organizations use a single, comprehensive, integrated solution to make informed strategic decisions that optimize return-on-investment, lower asset lifecycle costs, and increase enterprise-wide productivity and profitability. More than 7,000,000 ARCHIBUS users manage over 18 million buildings and properties, with organizations reporting facilities-related cost savings as high as 34 percent. With over 1,700 ARCHIBUS Business Partners, local and regional support worldwide is available in over 190 countries and more than 30 languages.
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