Situation

Whether the task is as complex as supporting a department during a move, as urgent as fixing a leaky roof or broken air conditioning system, or as simple as replacing a bank of lights, Grubb & Ellis Management Services is an acknowledged leader in facilities management. The company has built a stellar reputation for maintaining cost-efficient operations and delivering superior levels of service for a variety of owner-occupied facilities nationwide. Key to its service delivery is the Grubb & Ellis Client Service Center, which provides technical support, centralized reporting, Web-based management tools, and a call center and help desk that are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

As of 2006, Grubb & Ellis provided facility management services at multiple locations for more than 55 corporate clients. It manages a combined total of nearly 160 million square feet, ranging from corporate headquarters to data centers and industrial complexes. Approximately 9 million square feet of that total belongs to Microsoft, whose campuses are located primarily in the Puget Sound area of Washington State, but also in other locations around the United States.

Cost efficiency and superior service are two high priorities for Grubb & Ellis as it continually seeks to enhance overall customer satisfaction. In fall 2005, Grubb & Ellis began to look specifically at its work order process related to maintaining the Microsoft campuses. Three types of work orders can be generated within its Maximo Enterprise computerized maintenance management system (CMMS):

• Customer-generated work orders created by any Microsoft employee who needs something done, such as a white board installed or the room temperature adjusted.
• Preventive maintenance work orders, which are set up on a routine schedule with a list of tasks that the technician is to perform.
• Self-generated work orders from technicians who notice a situation that needs attention, such as a bank of lights that are burned out. Technicians can generate a work order to capture the time and material associated with resolving the problem.

Historically, work orders were printed at the Grubb & Ellis office, where approximately 100 Microsoft-dedicated Grubb & Ellis technicians came to pick them up each morning and sometimes at other times throughout the day. Each technician carried a cell phone that doubled as a radio, so if an urgent problem came up in the middle of the day, the technician could be notified. However, technicians still had to return to the office to get work orders that had the details of the job. Also, in the course of completing a work order, if technicians saw a situation that required attention, such as lights that needed to be replaced, they would have to call the office and have a work order generated, and then go pick it up or find a PC where they could access the work order and print it.

With more than 355 acres and 90 buildings on the Microsoft Redmond Campus alone, these back-and-forth trips to gather work orders and equipment histories and to check for available replacement parts reduced the technicians’ efficiency. In addition, at the end of the day, technicians were spending from 30 minutes to an hour entering the work order data into the Maximo Enterprise system.

Aware that Microsoft was expecting to add another 3 million square feet of facilities in the Redmond area over a three-year period, Grubb & Ellis, in conjunction with the Microsoft Real Estate and Facilities Group, began to research ways to increase efficiency in the face of increasing work orders. In particular, the team decided to look at adding a mobile component to Grubb & Ellis’s work order system.

The goal for the mobile solution is to supply real-time information to technicians and eliminate several steps in the work order process. The increased efficiency is expected to allow Grubb & Ellis to handle the added demand for services resulting from the increased size of Microsoft campuses while adding few employees.

By adding a mobile solution, we hope to serve that larger campus and a higher number of work orders while adding far fewer technicians than would normally be expected, says Michael Pilch, Director of Client Services for Grubb & Ellis.

Solution

Grubb & Ellis set three major requirements for its mobile solution. The mobile component to its CMMS solution needed to help the company:

• Continue to meet its Service Level Agreement with Microsoft as square footage increases by up to 30 percent.
• Deliver an even higher degree of customer satisfaction.
• Communicate work order status more quickly to its Microsoft customers.

After looking at various proprietary solutions and solutions based on Windows Mobile® software, the Microsoft Real Estate and Facilities Group and Grubb & Ellis decided to pilot-test the DataSplice Mobile Integration Suite. DataSplice, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, emerged as the leading choice because of Grubb & Ellis’s prior experience with the company as well as the speed of implementation and rapid integration of its mobile solution with the CMMS. Based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, the DataSplice solution is highly configurable, so it can be quickly modified to provide users with remote access tailored exactly to the way they work.

The pilot solution began with designers from DataSplice sitting down with some of the onsite facilities team from Grubb & Ellis to define the high-level requirements for the system such as views, fields, and navigational requirements. “We started with our best practice mobility template for the kind of field service solution we were looking for,” says Scott Kunze, President of DataSplice Mobile Computing. “Then we modified that template to match the specific requests of the Grubb & Ellis technicians.”

The resulting prototype solution was deployed on a Sprint PCS Vision Smart Device (PPC- 6700) running Windows Mobile 5.0 for Pocket PC Phone Edition. DataSplice also developed all the training materials, manuals, and online tutorials for the solution and provided three days of on-site training for the Grubb & Ellis pilot team. When training was complete, the pilot team technicians at the Microsoft Redmond campus began to use the device to connect to the Grubb & Ellis Maximo development environment to work on simulated work orders.

After testing the DataSplice mobile application for two months in the development environment, Grubb & Ellis redirected the application to the firm’s production environment so that the pilot team could work with live customer work orders. At that point team members also began to offer feedback on enhancements and changes they would like to see. Some of the initial feedback included requests to simplify the interface and to increase database performance.

“The technicians provided the feedback necessary to make their own use of the smart devices more productive,” says Michael Groppi, Senior Vice President and National Director, Engineering and Facility Resources Group for Grubb & Ellis. Some of the particular advantages pilot users noted included the real-time access to work order information and the ability to get more work done in the same amount of time.

In addition, a few months after the DataSplice pilot started, Grubb & Ellis technicians participating in the pilot were invited to download a beta version of Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile, which extends the reach of Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 to Windows Mobile powered devices. The pilot participants used Office Communicator Mobile to easily check who was online and send them instant messages, or have conversations about particular work requests through their handheld devices.

“Now that the technicians have the functionality they need to do all aspects of their jobs, we can start to measure the results,” says Mickey Allen, Account Executive for Grubb & Ellis.