West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust

Streamlining Facilities & Estates Management

“It was the facilities merger between four local Trusts that focused our thinking with regard to streamlining our estates management activities,” recalls Phil Child, the IT & Energy Manager within the Estates Services Team (EST) at West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust. “We wanted a single integrated IT solution that would enable us to carry out a range of estates management tasks and replace the four disparate systems we had inherited.”

With 788 beds and 4087 employees and occupies some 120,000 square metres of floor space. Annual income from patient treatment amounts to over £170 million.
Serving the demands of several sites meant that efficiency was vital.

“We looked at the systems that were in place at the different sites and decided to replace them with one that would enable us to carry out the full scope of our estates management operations more effectively,” says Phil.

After an extensive search of the market, the senior management team of EST chose Mass, suppliers of ARCHIBUS.

“We decided on ARCHIBUS because it offered ease of use, improved functionality and the flexibility to handle a wide range of tasks. It could also readily be tailored to our needs.”

Another important consideration was the system’s ability to integrate seamlessly with AutoCAD. The Trust’s property comprises a typical mix of old and new buildings, dating back to the mid 1800s, the drawings for some of which are on CAD and some on paper. The EST plans to convert all drawings to CAD, which will enable it to manage the whole of the Trust’s space in ARCHIBUS.

“This will also be important in terms of complying with the government’s guidance on Legionnaires’ disease, which means that we have to have up to date drawings of all buildings and services,” observes Phil.

The system at West Hertfordshire comprises all the core ARCHIBUS modules: Space, Assets, Building Operations, Property & Lease, Telecommunications & Cables plus the AutoCAD Overlay and Mass’ own integrated Facilities Helpdesk, running on a Windows NT 4.0 network.

“We are currently focusing on maintenance management,” says Phil. “We have a helpdesk team which takes all the calls for defect work, around 175 calls per day, and logs them on the system. We run SLA reports, which calculate the time the job was logged, issued and completed, and the elapsed time between those three points. The system makes it easy to monitor our performance against service levels and identify where improvements can be made.”

“The information we hold in ARCHIBUS also helps us to complete the ERIC returns and generate space occupancy reports that show the amount of space available, how it is being used and what it costs.”

Phil outlines some of the benefits they have achieved so far.

“We now have access to real time accurate information about our estates maintenance, assets and buildings. We generate management reports on a monthly basis containing all this information and submit them to the trust to enable them to carry out their business planning efficiently. It has certainly enabled us to streamline our estates management operations and p

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