How HSD helped the DE&T audit all Victorian state-owned schools for their condition and maintenance requirements.

Case Study - PRMS Audit 2000

Victorian Department of Education and Training (DE&T)
Physical Resources Management System – PRMS Audit 2000

Challenge

To obtain high quality data on the current condition and maintenance costs for the next 5 years, of all State owned schools in Victoria, Australia. The data capture was to be electronic and occur in the shortest possible time frame.

Project Goals: -

Resolution

In July 2000 Hammond Street Developments Pty. Ltd. (HSD) was approached by the Facilities Branch of the Victorian Department of Education and Training (DE&T) to provide a proposal to develop all of the software and computer systems required for a Condition Audit Project. The project is known as the Physical Resources Management System Audit, or the PRMS Audit 2000 Project.

Given the experience of HSD in developing audit systems for the original PRMS Audit held in 1995, and our recent experience in developing software for DE&T Schools Compliance Audit Project, HSD was awarded the contract.

Description

“With millions of dollars in contracts depending to the success of delivering these requirements, failure is unacceptable” said Russell Collier.

As part of its service provision mandate, the DE&T is committed to providing safe and secure buildings for all Departmentally owned and operated facilities. In 1995, as part of its Asset Management Strategy, DE&T advertised tenders for the implementation of its PRMS.

The project involved a physical audit of the maintenance condition of all school buildings, the development of four software programs (including one corporate and one school-based) and the provision of training, documentation and project management services.

The more urgent works identified in the original PRMS maintenance audits have since been completed. Given the effects of inflation and the normal wear and tear experienced by buildings over time, the remaining data is becoming dated and of diminishing value. In July 2000, the DE&T identified the need to refresh its maintenance database.

Situation Analysis

The original PRMS audit was carried out by a single contractor auditing all schools. The Department experienced a number of problems with this process. Given the number of auditors required for the project and normal staff wastage, the audit contractor experienced difficulty in retaining sufficient numbers of trained auditors to achieve the required timelines.

From an administrative viewpoint, there were also some difficulties with a single entity attempting to deal with 1650 schools – scheduling audits and auditors, making bookings, dealing with cancellations, responding to queries, etc.

On completion of the main audit, there is also an ongoing requirement for both full and specialist audits on an ad-hoc basis. The Department therefore requires a number of experienced audit contractors for this work. Given this, the Facilities Branch decided that the PRMS 2000 maintenance audit would be conducted through multiple contracts. Victoria is divided into 9 regions for educational purposes. Four audit zones were created from combinations of the 9 regions.

Three Principal Contractors were awarded contracts to audit the four audit zones, through standard tendering processes.

Action Plan and Decision Process

Given the short timelines that had been set for the project, Russell Collier, Assistant General Manager - Facilities Division, could not afford to take any risks on unproven vendors when time was a critical factor to the programme’s success.

HSD had already earned Russell’s confidence by delivering many other complex business solutions, both on time and within budget, while always exceeding the expectations of the various project managers. “HSD was awarded the project for several key reasons” said Robin Purchase, Project Manager of the PRMS Audit 2000. “The ability of HSD to integrate with the various DE&T systems, develop automated business solutions and construct robust and efficient applications made them an easy choice for this project” he added.

Solution Profile and Implementation Strategy

The Maintenance Audit was carried out using hand held Pen Activated Computers (PAC) and proprietary software developed by HSD on behalf the Department.

The Principal Contractor downloaded the relevant building and room data for each school in accordance with their audit program. Every building element in every building, room or site was assessed as part of the audit. For each sub-element, the auditor was required to identify the nature and scope/quantity of any works and give them an appropriate priority.

The software automatically provides an estimate, however where unusual circumstances exist, the principal contractor/auditor may provide an overriding estimated cost.

After the data had been quality assured by the contractor it was then uploaded back to the DE&T. The Facilities Branch then performed their own quality assessment on the data as a part of the acceptance and signoff process.

Project Requirements: -

Managing up to 1650 audits, distributed across 4 audit zones, controlled by 3 Principal Contractors, using 50 auditors, and then communicating this information to all stakeholders in a timely manner was a big challenge for HSD. We had to design a system that would not only provide flexibility for the Principal Contractors in maintaining audit schedules and extracting data, but also transparently include all of the business rules from other DE&T systems and business practices. HSD recognised that any failure to reliably deliver these requirements would cause great consternation for the stakeholders and detrimentally affect the time lines of the whole project.

“With millions of dollars in contracts depending to the success of delivering these requirements, failure is unacceptable” said Russell Collier.

After much discussion and debate between the members of the HSD development team, we decided on the following basic principals when it came to system design: -

"The entire audit was performed in three working months". This was a significant improvement over the first PRMS audit that took over twelve months.

The whole solution was broken up into four distinct systems.

Over the Internet, the AMS user interface connects to a centralised server located at the DE&T. This made it relatively easy to deploy a fully functional Windows application to the Principal Contractors and manage the business rules, process and data from a central location.

Figure 1. AMS System Architecture

Visual Basic 6, MS-SQL Server, DCOM/COM+, AutoCAD, MS-Office and other specifically designed Active X controls were used in the development of the solution. An n-tier approach was taken in the solution design.

Implementation Approach and Timetable

Three parallel paths were taken in the development of the solution. One team developed the MDC suite of applications, the second team developed the AMS application while a third team developed the automated business components along with the transaction, data management and integration services. A software architect and consultant managed the whole project.

“Having confidence in HSD to deliver the solution on time allowed me to pursue other tender and business requirements of the project. This was absolutely necessary in a project where the timeline was unmoveable” said Robin.

“Being able to connect fully functional applications to a central server securely over the Internet allowed us to rapidly develop, deploy and support the entire solution.” said Michael Nancarrow, Senior Consultant at HSD.

"We were able to audit the schools at a rate much higher than we ever anticipated. This significantly improved the bottom line result of the audit project."

Business Results

One of the most significant key performance indicators of the project was the time that it would take to perform the audits of the schools. Russell noted, “The entire audit was performed in three working months”. This was a significant improvement over the first PRMS audit that took over twelve months.

One DE&T staff member managed the entire audit project. The Business Automation component saved the DE&T significant administration overhead that a project of this kind would normally require.

The PRMS maintenance audit identified and prioritised the maintenance needs of all schools across the state in a consistent and uniform manner. It provided the Department with an invaluable tool to analyse and plan its maintenance program both on a state-wide and individual school basis. Schools have also used the resulting audit data to plan their maintenance activities at a local level.

As testament to the robustness and quality of the MDC software, John Peirce, Project Manager for Sinclair Knight Merz (one of the audit contractors) reported, “We were able to audit the schools at a rate much higher than we ever anticipated. This significantly improved the bottom line result of the audit project”. The other two principal contractors reported similar results.

Case Epilogue

Significant interest from the Facilities Management industry has been shown in the solution following the completion of the project. After further investigation, the DE&T and HSD formed a business partnership to commercialise the solution.

On November 14 th 2001, HSD released a new product called HSDfm. The product is selling well and is setting new benchmarks in the Facilities Management industry for maintenance planning systems.