Influencing Proactive Maintenance Projects

The College of DuPage partnered with FOS to deliver a comprehensive facility condition assessment (FCA) across a multi-campus, 1.9 million square foot asset portfolio. The FCA deliverables helped the College understand the existing condition of all physical assets, associated deferred maintenance needs and capital renewal liabilities, and the remaining service life of all major/minor building systems. These deliverables allowed the College to prepare annual budgets as well as short and long-range plans for repair or replacing projects. We worked with the College to create a tailored approach that prioritized assets within the portfolio and scaled our resources to meet a challenging deadline. Using a three-team approach for field data collection, we were able to assess nearly 2 million square feet of buildings and parking lots in just one week. 

Our team leveraged the College’s annual inspection worksheet to integrate our assessment process with existing procedures, allowing facilities engineering staff to connect their reporting needs to the baseline FCA dataset. Our project manager cross-walked the annual inspection worksheet with [now retired] College Director of Facilities, Bruce Schmiedl, tailoring our data collection approach to ensure congruency between both approaches. 

As part of our project closeout process, we worked with the College’s project management team to deliver a presentation to their board of trustees. This detailed project goals, execution process, and how the deliverables will act as an important long-term planning tool for the facilities and capital planning office’s activities in physical asset maintenance and operations. 

Typically, clients tend to think that facility condition assessments are only for institutions that have a problem present. In this case, the College was already doing a great job with their available funding, using this FCA as a longer-term planning tool to stay on top of scheduled replacements and repairs. Throughout the assessment, we found that they had very few “poor” buildings in terms of a facility condition index rating and any problems we confirmed were cost estimated to provide the College with actionable figures. We documented deficiencies, provided recommendations, and presented the data for evaluation in a way that allowed the College to propel a funding request. 

We’d like to give kudos to this client. This FCA was a wholly collaborative experience with the College’s passionate, hands-on project team. Our joint efforts led to effective knowledge capture and the collection of data in a timely manner so the College was able to immediately use our findings to build budgets and plan projects for continued facilities stewardship.