Washington County Maximizes Space Efficiency with FM:Systems

How Washington County successfully transitioned from its aging legacy system to the intuitive and cloud-based FMS:Workplace to optimize the utilization of existing building space, and significantly improve visibility and enhance interdepartmental integration across 26 properties.

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The Client

With a population of 267,000 residents, Washington County’s mission is to provide excellent and cost-effective services that support healthy, peaceful, safe, and sustainable communities while encouraging meaningful participation in community activities and ensuring County governance. It has more than 1,300 employees who work across 26 buildings totaling nearly 1 million square feet.

Employees

Million

Square Feet

Buildings

The Challenge

For many years, Washington County relied on an outdated legacy system that became increasingly challenging to use for space planning, managing their evolving workplace and assets, and employee experience needs. The existing system not only required heavy customization, which led to frequent inconsistencies and user errors, it also lacked intuitive design that ultimately discouraged the facilities and space planning team from using it all together. And when the County added a new property to its real estate portfolio, with plans to renovate and triple its size, the necessary upgrades to the existing system were exceptionally difficult that made it impossible to input the floor plan.

“The previous solution actually had the capability to provide digital floor plans, but we were unable to add our newest building’s floor plan into the system,” said Whitney Libby, Project Specialist at Washington County

Without having visibility into their workplace expansion project, it became highly cumbersome and time-intensive to research where facilities technicians were asked to make repairs, which rooms needed to be serviced, and to accurately track work orders for specific places without knowing where and when to follow up. What’s more, because everyone had different ways of tracking utilization data and technician work orders, data was inconsistent, and oftentimes required calling the customer support contact to export reports.

The County also struggled with handling conditional formatting to allow for necessary security access requests for each department, since the IT, HR and Sheriff’s department all had varying clearance requirements.

Lastly, the legacy system lacked effective data gathering for proactively managing preventive maintenance tasks. The County found themselves manually inputting and managing large numbers of equipment pieces that was equally time-consuming and inefficient.

The previous solution actually had the capability to provide digital floor plans, but we were unable to add our newest building’s floor plan into the system.

Whitney Libby, Project Specialist, Washington County

The Solution

Rather than make costly upgrades to a system that wasn’t functioning, Washington County turned to FMS:Workplace for a reliable workplace management solution that could easily provide space planning for managing their existing and future space needs as well as effectively provide maintenance and asset management across their full real estate portfolio.

“FM:Systems is a highly regarded platform that helps thousands of organizations optimize their facilities and workplaces. For Washington County, having a completely integrated workplace management solution that was easy for people to use, could automate data gathering, and was scalable to grow with our changing needs was key,” said Anna Wagner, Operations Manager at Washington County.

IWMS software interface showcasing workplace management solutions

When FM:Systems was selected as the IWMS vendor for Washington County, RSP Architects worked closely with Washington County to conduct a needs analysis of their current solution to ensure FMS:Workplace was set up to match the way the County needed it to function immediately, and in the future. This involved discovering what data was available from the legacy system, making sure the data was categorized correctly when transferring over to FMS:Workplace, and lightly configuring the new system for easy adoption.

FM:Systems is a highly regarded platform that helps thousands of organizations optimize their facilities and workplaces. For Washington County, having a completely integrated workplace management solution that was easy for people to use, could automate data gathering, and was scalable to grow with our changing needs was key.

Anna Wagner, Operations Manager, Washington County

The Results

The switch to FMS:Workplace has significantly transformed the workplace management process for Washington County, providing a user-friendly and robust solution for easily managing, analyzing, and reporting on all their workplace, facilities and real estate operation and maintenance (O&M) data.

In just six months of using FMS:Workplace, Washington County has experienced:

Reliable Workplace Data:

Because the new system provided a more intuitive and user-friendly interface, teams were now able to easily input required fields and clear activity categories. This ensured that complete and accurate workplace management data was now being tracked in the system properly; work orders were also now being submitted, improving visibility into maintenance needs, and communication with technicians.

Enhanced Security Access Requests:

The new system offered a simple way to accurately manage clearance options based on department, streamlining the process and ensuring the right security access levels were assigned.

Streamlined Preventive Maintenance:

The new system offered features like templates and PM schedulers, simplifying the management of preventive maintenance tasks. Instead of manually inputting each equipment piece like they had previously, FMS:Workplace templates could now be used to assign multiple pieces of equipment automatically, saving time and improving efficiency.