Bentley's 5,000 students receive preparation in the arts and sciences, interact with a faculty of nearly 500 experienced full- and part-time teachers with real-world research and consulting experience, and enjoy a vibrant campus teeming with athletic, social, and cultural opportunities.

Several years ago, Bentley University's facilities management department sought a solution to automate its business processes. The university's main objective was to better control operating costs while maintaining a first-class campus. Ideally, the school wanted to deploy an asset management system to help automate all facilities management processes, including work order management and the cumbersome annual dorm inspections. Dorm room inspections involved a time-consuming process of logging invalid inspections, keying that data into a system, and issuing paper work orders.

Bentley turned to Infor EAM for a web-based asset management system, drastically reducing the manual overhead and time required to process work orders. A few years later, Bentley embarked on a journey to become climate neutral. Toward that end, the university created a sustainability task force to evaluate all campus assets and determine comprehensive ways to reduce its carbon footprint. When the task force concluded that electricity usage on campus was a big contributor to greenhouse gases, the university began the quest for an automated solution to reduce electrical consumption.

"Bentley is committed to reducing its electrical consumption by 4 percent in the next three fiscal years," says Kerri Roche, the university's assistant director for sustainability and energy.

"To achieve this goal, we needed to make as many improvements as possible throughout the entire campus."

Getting Business Specific

A business university with heavy emphasis on technology, Bentley decided to seek a proven solution to meet its current and future needs. Patty Patria, director of enterprise initiatives, explains, "We organized a team from IT, facilities, and other areas, and evaluated best-of-breed facilities tools. Infor EAM proved to be the best—the most robust and easiest to set up and customize."

Implementation of Infor EAM began by identifying business processes involving the greatest change for Bentley, Patria says. "We knew that the Infor application was the Ferrari of EAM software, and we wanted to customize the interface to make it easiest for our users. With the help of Infor support staff and using built-in EAM capabilities to automate routine tasks, we created a simple product for facilities staff. And from an IT standpoint, the special configuration and customization we incorporated would also transfer with each upgrade, which makes our lives much easier." Patria concludes; "The Infor EAM solution was up and running smoothly in about four months because we faced a critical dorm inspection process within that time. We automated not only the complex dorm room inspection process, but also the 35,000 work orders that we process yearly using Infor EAM. The program has helped us save enormous costs, and we've had a great experience working with Infor."

When Bentley turned again to its partner to look for ways to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, one of the targeted areas was the university's preventative maintenance system.

"We run a calendar-based PM (preventative main tenance) system, and we started to question its efficiency," says Roche. "We discovered a tool to help us not only meet our energy and emissions goals, but also save money. When Infor came to us, we were looking for ways to save electricity and integrate our automated building control system with an asset sustainability version of Infor EAM."

But Infor EAM Asset Sustainability does much more. It's now helping Bently run its preventative maintenance on a predictive level, instead of a calendar-based PM system. "By predicting maintenance, we see big reductions in our electrical consumption and carbon footprint, and we're saving costs."

Real-time performance monitoring and alerting is a part of Infor EAM that ties the Bentley building control system into its asset management strategy. These capabilities anticipate failures before they happen. Notes Roche, "Our building automation system has several exhaust hoods, and one hood belt breaks all the time. We know from experience that once this exhaust hood starts to draw less than four amperes, a failure is imminent within the following week or two. But previously we couldn't always catch the failures before they would happen."

Infor EAM takes the amperage readings from the exhaust hoods once per day, and if the reading drops to less than four amperes, it automatically generates a work order to change the belts. "We now save ourselves from that failure every time," says Roche.

Infor EAM enables Bentley to strengthen the traditional calendar-based PM system with predictive maintenance on assets, resulting in greater equipment efficiency. "Experts say that predictive maintenance helps organizations save 4 percent to 10 percent in electrical charges," says Roche.

"Sustainability and green initiatives are important in higher education, and especially at Bentley University," says Roche. "We take this commitment seriously, incorporating it into all aspects of the college—from transportation to waste management, recycling, even into our academic courses. With Infor EAM, we've been able to reduce our electrical consumption and our carbon footprint while saving money. And we're really excited about what it can do for us next."

Another important reason that Bentley chose Infor EAM is because of its mobile tool. This tool allows Bentley facility staff to use ruggedized hand-held devices with barcode scanning. For fire safety inspections and ad hoc work order inspections, facility people walk around the 42 campus buildings, all of which have individual barcodes on every room.Says Patria,"If they find a problem in a room or with a fire extinguisher, they click the barcode button using the handheld device, which "reads" the room or the fire extinguisher. Using a book containing barcode entries, they can quickly and easily scan the status of rooms, work orders, or equipment. It's a great tool to automate the capture of ad hoc data."

"Once barcoding is complete, we take the mobile tool and synchronize it with the database, allowing us to transfer the inspection and/or ad hoc work order generation data into our Infor EAM tool," Patia says. "We also plan to improve our already automated dorm inspection process with Infor's ad hoc inspection technology."

Infor EAM has helped Bentley University to:

• Automate dorm room inspections and processing of 35,000 work orders per year
• Significantly reduce electrical consumption and carbon emissions
• Reduce equipment failures through predictive maintenance
• Capture ad hoc asset data quickly and easily using mobile tool with barcoding feature
• Streamline and upgrade work management processes, reducing training and IT costs Bentley University foresees several other applications using Infor EAM
• Asset Sustainability to streamline its processes and reduce energy consumption.

"We want to automate our inventory process and barcode our stockroom using barcode scanners," says Patria. "We'll receive stock through hand-held devices, and do all of our stock takes by barcoding. This will save so much time for our inventory control people and help run that process more efficiently."