From a dark hallway light fixture to holes in the parking lot to a stopped toilet or sink drain, whom do you contact about Rice facility asset problems?  The FSC, of course.  The Facilities Service Center (FSC) is the Facilities, Engineering and Planning  team  responsible for processing customer requests regarding facility assets, which can be a location (roadway, parking lot, green space, etc.), a building, or a piece of equipment.  The FSC uses a system called FAMIS, an acronym for “Facility Asset Management Information System” or “Fix and Maintain Important Stuff.” FAMIS has been designed specifically for facility asset management, primarily in higher education.

Since the vendor’s web application for submitting FAMIS work orders did not include all the information Rice wanted to track, FE&P worked with IT to create a customized web portal called FAMISWEB. This tool interfaces directly with both Banner and FAMIS and has helped customers more easily report facility asset incidents that required attention since 2011.

Anyone with a NetID can submit a request through https://famisweb.rice.edu.  However,  building work orders may be billable to the department requesting the service, so most groups use a dedicated FSC point person.  This person logs their department’s requests for service through FAMISWEB and can log into the requests to check the status of work in progress or completion.

“One of the problems we needed to overcome was increased transparency for the items that made up the total cost for a job,” said Jim Alty, Associate Vice President for FE&P.  “FAMISWEB could show the total cost of a job, but not the details.”  Unfortunately, cost details are tracked in FAMIS tables that do not have a way to limit permissions by department.  If a department coordinator had been given access to see the FAMIS details about their own work orders, they would also have been able to see the details for other department’s work orders.

Working from Alty’s instructions to add transparency to the FAMISWEB work order process, FE&P collaborated with IT’s Enterprise Applications team to update FAMISWEB.   The FAMISWEB update was implemented earlier this fall and the campus community couldn’t be happier.

“The biggest change in FAMISWEB was providing transparency to the customers in regard to the costs of billable work orders for their individual departments,” said Loranda Iverson, FSC Supervisor. “Now, not only do they see the labor and materials costs applied to their work orders, they can also see the technician’s comments and details about those costs.” Previously, customers called the FSC to ask questions about additional charges after the work had been completed. Iverson and other FE&P employees could see details in the parent system, FAMIS, but the details were not available to customers in Banner. Today, customers can review details about processed and outstanding purchase orders.

Iverson explains the complex timeline for processing contractor and other costs before, during and after the work begins and ends. “It may take several days (or up to three weeks in extreme cases) for individual charges to be submitted, reviewed and approved. It is critical that these internal checks and balances be cleared before a cost is applied to actual work order, but that clearing process proved confusing to customers who saw only that the job was completed a week ago and now they’ve received another bill.” The FSC bills weekly, to get charges out to customers as quickly as possible, but the system can only bill the charges that have cleared the process. Revealing encumberances (outstanding costs) was one of the significant changes in the recent FAMISWEB upgrade.

“Now, customers can login and see the costs to date, the open encumbrances, and the total potential costs for the work order, regardless of whether or not the work has been completed.” Iverson adds, “And we’ve gotten great feedback from our customers!”