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May 29, 1997

Facilities Management goes on-line with work requests

Need to have your office air conditioning fixed or a cracked window replaced? In the past, such work requests found their way to the Office of Facilities Management through a hodgepodge of channels, including telephone calls, fax messages, campus mail and even word-of-mouth.

Requests coming in from so many different sources could take days to reach the right person and occasionally even got lost along the way. But that was the past.

Facilities Management now has available at its World Wide Web site an application that allows University departments to submit work requests on-line to its work control center, which cuts down substantially on both the response time to a request and the paperwork. Customers who tried the system during a recent six-week test period were "very pleased," according to Janet Craig, work control specialist in the Office of Facilities Management. It is an assessment supported by Dick Howe, associate dean for Administration in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

"Thanks for moving this [work request] process to the modern age," Howe said in a letter to Facilities Management. "This is the best thing since the ability to fax a form over to FM with hard copy to follow. In fact, it is even better since no hard copy is required as a follow-up." Craig said the on-line work request system has "gotten very favorable reviews because it is received instantaneously and generally is turned around within a couple of hours." In the new system, as soon as a work request is received at the Facilities Management Website, it is assigned a tracking number and the work center is informed that a work request has come in.

"I pull up the Web request. We put one of our regular job numbers on it and assign it," Craig said. "When I do that, I e-mail back the person who sent in the request so that they have the job number and know who has been assigned to it. That way they know it has been received and who will be contacting them. From there on, it pretty much follows the regular flow of paperwork." Facilities Management will continue to accept work requests through the old channels. However, Craig said, fewer and fewer such requests have been coming in from departments that have tried the new system.

Eventually, according to Craig, Facilities Management wants to develop a system that will transfer everything electronically to the trades, such as carpenters, painters and electricians. Currently, the trades still must rely on hard copies provided by the work control center.

"That's the next step up," Craig added. "Then if they [supervisors] wanted to print out a copy for the tradesmen going on the job they could. But that still would eliminate the paper flow from the office to the trades." The idea of accepting work requests on-line has been tossed around by Facilities Management for some time, according to Craig. It became more of a priority item, she said, after Ana Guzman stepped in as interim associate vice chancellor for Facilities Management last year.

"There has been a big push to get us to modernize," Craig noted. She said the availability of Windows 97 and Microsoft Access also was a factor because it made the change easier.

–Mike Sajna n The new on-line work request system can be accessed through the Office of Facilities Management's World Wide Web home page at http://www.facmgmt.pitt.edu.

Once on the home page, users should select the button marked "Work Requests" and follow the instructions shown.

Users need to supply their name and password. After the work request form is completed, it can be sent to Facilities Management by selecting the "Submit" button.

Further information about the system is available by calling Janet Craig, 624-9296.


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