Mar, 2015

Systems critical for University operations

 

For the past 10 years, more than 50 U of L Facilities’ employees have depended on obtaining their daily work schedules and tasks through TMA, a computerized maintenance management system. And all U of L employees and students have relied on Facilities’ staff to deliver the University’s needs: power, air flow, plumbing, building maintenance, event setups, and cleanliness.webTMA

Users of Facilities’ work request system are blissfully unaware of the many months, weeks, days and hours spent planning, collaborating, testing and finally rolling out the new webTMA in December last year. But ask anyone from the Systems, Applications or Telecom teams in IT Services, or the Facilities’ teams, and they’ll tell you.

“The original TMA work order system had been in place for more than 10 years,” says Wim Chalmet, Facility Operations and Maintenance Director. “As with any software product, desktop versions are costly and require regular upgrades and maintenance. IT Systems has been moving away from desktop installations to web-based solutions for some time now. TMA was able to provide a solution, technical support and the flexibility we needed.”

The hard work of planning, upgrading the database server, applications server and the web component began in earnest. “We needed to know how we were going to move away from the desktop application and how to implement the web-based system quickly and cleanly. If it didn’t work correctly when we switched over, it could jeopardize all of the work orders waiting to be fulfilled. IT Services recommended that a test server be built so that we could play with it and fix any glitches. So we had to stagger all of the work.”

Once the Facilities and IT Services teams were confident it would operate as required, TMA converted the database to the new platform, sent it back to ITS for uploading, and the system went live.

“We had to stop all work at 3:30 pm one day and it was up and running by 9:30 am the next day. Advanced planning with ITS Systems was critical to ensure resources were available. Everything worked really well. We were very happy with all the guidance from the ITS Systems and Telecom teams. It was well planned and executed,” says Chalmet. “Excellent cooperation and collaboration meant that the Facilities’ work order system was up and running without significant downtime, not to mention those waiting for their work orders to be completed.”

The new webTMA interface can be viewed here.

For more information, contact Wim Chalmet at 403-380-1837 or wim.chalmet@uleth.ca.