West Hertfordshire NHS: Streamlined Facilities & Estates Management

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

- Phil Child, IT & Energy Manager for West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust

"It was the facilities merger between four local Trusts that focused our thinking with regard to streamlining our estates management activities," recalls Phil Child.

"We wanted a single integrated IT solution that would enable us to carry out a whole range of estates management tasks and replace the four disparate systems we had inherited." The Facilities re-grouping across the four Trusts began in 1998. It took in two of the region’s acute trusts St Albans & Hemel Hempstead and Watford & Mount Vernon, which merged to become West Hertfordshire Hospitals Trust.

Later, Horizon NHS Trust and West Hertfordshire Community Health Trust became Hertfordshire Partnership NHS Trust (HPT) and four Primary Care Trusts. The Trusts provide a wide range of services such as acute medicine, general and vascular surgery, cancer treatment, orthopaedics and trauma, as well as a full service to paediatric gynaecology and obstetric patients. Pathology and diagnostic services include CT, MRI and nuclear medicine. HPT and the PCT’s provide services such as mental health, paediatric and adolescent care, learning disabilities, intermediate and primary care. With 788 beds and 4087 employees, the Trust (West Herts Hospitals) occupies some 120,000 square metres of floor space. Annual income from patient treatment amounts to over £170 million.

The Estates Services Team (EST) was formed at around the same time as this merger, having won an in-house bid for the supply of ‘hard FM services’, including energy and building maintenance, grounds maintenance, estate management and providing an in-house design capability, following the Trust’s decision to put them out to tender. EST is hosted by West Hertfordshire Hospitals Trust and sells these services to Hertfordshire Partnership NHS Trust, Dacorum PCT, Hertsmere PCT, St Albans & Harpenden PCT and Watford & Three Rivers PCT, so efficiency is extremely important.

After an extensive search of the market, the senior management team of EST, (Mike Hudders, Head of Estates, Richard Simon, Estates Manager, and Phil) chose the ARCHIBUS solution offered by Mass.

"Once we make this type of information available via the web, this will open up many additional benefits that will have an impact right across the Trust. The Finance Department, for example, will be able to see the financial position in real time, enabling better control of expenditure" - Phil Child

"EST comprises a range of estates management personnel, including maintenance managers, property managers, design team professionals, helpdesk operators and 54 maintenance crafts-people, and we were keen to take everyone’s requirements into account," says Phil, whose role was to coordinate the project, provide technical input and ultimately manage the system. "We drew up a shortlist of four systems, having considered eight or nine options to begin with. As well as seeing suppliers, we visited customer reference sites where we could see the various systems in operation and talk to users.

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. "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. The supervisors at the remote sites where the maintenance teams are based then monitor these calls. They call off the work and issue job dockets via the helpdesk to the trades staff. We run SLA reports, which calculate the time the job was logged, issued and completed, and the elapsed time between those three fixed points.

The system makes it easy to monitor our performance against service levels and identify where any improvements can be made." "The information we hold in ARCHIBUS also helps us to complete the ERIC returns with regard to space utilisation, service levels and so on. A significant amount of additional information is being requested now as opposed to previous years so it certainly helps that we can gain fast access to the information we need.

The data set for ERIC changes every year so the reporting flexibility in ARCHIBUS is very useful. We can quickly report on what space is leased out and leased in, and generate space occupancy reports that show the amount of space available, how it is being used and what it costs."

Business Benefits:

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 provide one source of information and one point of contact for all the sites."

For the near future, Phil has plans to web enable the system, starting with the helpdesk service, so that people in other departments can share estates information "on-line".