Supporting the Educational Mission with Effective Capital Planning

BEST PRACTICES IN DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

The Ontario University System (OUS) is comprised of 19 universities across the province, including schools such as Carleton University, Queen’s University and the University of Toronto, with a total of 357,000 full-time students. Programs in arts and science are offered at the undergraduate level system-wide, while a number of universities offer doctoral law, education, engineering or medicine/nursing programs. The entire system encompasses over 70 million square feet of facilities, with a current replacement value of approximately $20 billion. Forty-nine per cent of the system’s funding comes from the provincial government.

According to two major studies commissioned by the Council of Ontario Universities in 1999, “the demand for university education in Ontario could grow by as much as 40 per cent by 2010,” due to population growth and increasing rates of participation in university education. Rising enrollment strains resources for capital improvement; and with an aging infrastructure and a growing deferred maintenance backlog, the Ontario University System needed to develop long-term facility capital plans for each of the universities, as well as for the system as a whole.

Each university in the OUS had its own method for compiling data about facility condition. Some of the organizations conducted their own condition audits, others hired third-party firms, and several used a combination of inhouse staff and consultants. Each university also had different techniques for prioritizing maintenance projects and estimating costs. Neither deferred maintenance nor renewal needs were planned on a system-wide basis. The disparate data from each school made it difficult for school officials to conduct long-term capital planning across the system.

Changes in the Ontario education system increased the urgency of having reliable facility data for system-wide planning. The province was planning to transition its high school education system from a 13-year to a 12-year program in the next few years, doubling the number of incoming freshmen that the Ontario University System would need to educate and house. When the provincial government called for better quality data about system facilities, school officials realized changes were needed to meet the request.

“We needed to be able to build a persuasive argument to the provincial government for more funding. Irrefutable data on our existing facility conditions and deferred maintenance was a necessary component to achieving this goal,” says Darryl Boyce, assistant vice-president, Facilities Management and Planning at Carleton University.

THE SOLUTION: FACILITY CONDITION ASSESSMENT PROGRAM

Ensuring the accuracy and consistency of facility assessments system-wide was the initial challenge facing the Ontario University System. The solution was the Facility Condition Assessment Program (FCAP), which had two primary goals. The first was to provide consistent and comprehensive facilities data to the Ontario university presidents, governing boards and the provincial government. The second goal was to deliver best practice facility management tools to the universities’ physical plant departments.

The key factors in FCAP, agreed to by the 19 participating institutions, were a common facility database, and a common audit methodology with an annual audit of a minimum 20 per cent of each institution’s physical plant infrastructure. It would also include an annual Facility Con dition Assessment Report submitted to the university presidents and the Ontario government.

When selecting a common facility database, the Ontario University System looked for a software solution that would provide a web-based repository for all capital data. It also needed to be used to predict capital investment needs for facilities, identify budget impact on portfolio condition, and to allocate budgets more effectively and efficiently. The software would be used to quantify, prioritize, and validate data, as well as to create a business case for additional funding.

The Ontario system implemented FCAP as part of an integrated Capital Planning and Management Solution (CPMS) from VFA. The CPMS combines facility assessment services with VFA.facility® web-based software for asset management and capital planning. Each university in the Ontario University System assessed 15 per cent of its respective building portfolio each year using the VFA assessment methodology. Assessment information related to condition and maintenance requirements was captured in VFA.facility®, which serves as a central source for managing and analyzing facility information.

“Having this information on the World Wide Web has given us invaluable advantages,” says Kevin Gallinger, manager of maintenance services at Carleton University. “The same information is shared by everyone, from facilities people to the steering committee. We now have consistent cost models, benchmarks and reporting capabilities,” Gallinger says.