With continuing growth at St. George’s School in Vancouver, British Columbia, the Director of Operations and the Operations team recognized the need for a robust system to manage their facilities. The school’s facilities had expanded significantly to a property with two campuses serving 1200 students. At the same time, the team faced the ongoing retrofits, conversions and engineering challenges required to maintain the junior school’s heritage building. This combination of factors led to a significant increase in the operations staff over three years, with some previously outsourced services being brought in-house.
“Implementing ebase has significantly improved our ability to effectively manage our facilities. We are consistently developing the system as a partnership- between us, the user and ebase, the provider.”
Wanting to move away from paper-based, manual ways of operating, St. George’s sought recommendations from other schools and reviewed options. They also identified a wish list — a system that was competitively priced, that could be customized, and that was “rightsized” for their needs. With these priorities in mind, the school ultimately chose to implement ebase as the right system to improve their workflow and facility management processes.
Today, the Operations team has effectively implemented ebase, with tangible results and improvements. Starting with the Work Orders module, maintenance staff now respond in a timelier manner when staff and faculty identify issues. Work order assignments are more easily communicated via the mobile phones of the four-person maintenance crew and 12 custodians. Using the Asset Manager module, the school builds technical and preventative maintenance schedules and auto-generates work orders to ensure that critical servicing of equipment and facilities are not missed.
With its extensive campus, St. George’s facilities are in constant demand from neighbouring schools, community groups and even the University of British Columbia. The school uses ebase to manage rentals of their pool, athletic fields, event spaces, theatre, and the use of the campus by film production companies who increasingly use its stunning heritage buildings as a movie location.
“The first benefit we saw from ebase was that it made our workload easier. Now we are taking the second step — we will be using it as a tool for decision making, on everything from rental capacity, labour requirements, outsourcing functions, and developing costs and budgets. We find that the more you use the system, the greater the benefits. ebase is here to stay at St. George’s and we look forward to taking its capabilities to the next level.”
Growth at St. George’s has not slowed, leading to the use of the Project Manager module. The Operations team is now using ebase’s project management capabilities to track expenses, project progress and development for capital assets as it embarks on a significant renovation involving heating, millwork, and a/v capabilities; breaks ground for a new senior campus; and engages in spin-off decommissioning and retrofitting activities.
The school is currently working towards accurate measurement of overall time savings, increases
in workload efficiency, improvements in quality of work and reaction time, and increases in the bookings and revenue and profitability from facilities rental. Developing key performance indicators and benchmarks will allow St. George’s to quantify the improvements seen in workflow and processes that they continue to experience since implementing ebase.
