DCU is regarded as one of Ireland’s most innovative Universities. With over 10,000 students studying a wide range of courses, the University has undergone huge growth over the past 20 years at it’s campus in North Dublin.
A significant campus investment programme over the past 15 years has transformed DCU Campus into one of the most modern in Ireland. The DCU Estates Office is responsible for managing campus facilities. With the growth of the university, effective facilities management has become critical to the efficient operation of the university on a daily basis. The DCU Estates Office had been managing fault reporting for the entire campus via a custom Access based application which had itself become difficult to maintain and would clearly not scale as the campus grew.
DCU needed a web based system which would enable Staff and Students to easily report maintenance requests from anywhere on campus. The Estates Office would then need to be able to easily manage these requests and assign them to key contractors for rapid resolution.
Our Strategy and Technology Teams worked with the DCU Estates Office and DCU Information Systems to design a custom web application which would seamlessly integrate with existing authentication systems within the university. This would allow Staff and Students to report fault without needing another login to yet another system. Our project team worked closely with the Estates Office to build a prototype application which would also integrate with the the Net-FM Facilities Management System creating an innovative location driven fault reporting process which would provide the Estates Office with the precise location of a particular problem once reported.
We also built a very powerful issue management system for the Estates Office which allows system managers to quickly process fault reports and assign them to key campus staff who receive real time notification when a fault is reported.
The Technology Team worked with DCU Information Systems to implement a technical architecture which is based on the Microsoft .NET platform and Oracle. The Estates Office also have access to a powerful reporting suite which will be critical for planning future Capital Investment decisions within the University.
The system has been very well received since it’s launch in late 2009. For everyone involved, DCU Campus just got a little easier to manage.
