With the population of Austin, Texas, growing by leaps and bounds over the last decade, planning for growth has been high up on the agenda of Travis County administrators. Building new facilities and forecasting future expenditures was difficult, however, because the county could never put a firm figure on the cost of maintaining existing structures, which covered 1.1 million square feet.

"We had never systematically evaluated our entire physical plant, no less created the kind of dynamic inventory that Facility AuditMate does," notes John Carr, division manager for maintenance and repair in the Facilities Management Department. "Because we really didn't know the useful lifespan of the different components in our facilities, we tended to be at the mercy of problems as they came up."

The head of the division, Kevin Bailey, was an advocate for lifecycle modeling methods, having used similar systems in the Navy. He encouraged Carr and his assistant A. J. Jalifi to conduct an audit. After sending out bids, they turned to Diversified Intelligence.

The team from Diversified Intelligence conducted the inspection, entered the specifications, and installed Facility AuditMate on department computers. In addition to creating a facilities inventory, Diversified Intelligence compiled a deficiencies report of items that need attention immediately.

"We have been very pleased with the results," says Carr. "We use Facility AuditMate every day as we replace or add equipment." The experience has been so positive that other divisions of county government, like the Parks Department, have decided to have Diversified Intelligence audit their facilities.

Scott Beebe, director of physical plant at Washington and Lee University, faces an unusual challenge. It's not the size of his facility that's impressive-though at 1,600,000 square feet, it is no small responsibility. Rather it's the range of buildings he oversees. A full one-third of the structures at this historic, 250-year-old university are more than 75 years old. Keeping on top of deferred maintenance was a headache.

Beebe had tried to conduct an in-house physical plant audit with his own crew, only to find that he just couldn't get the job done with existing manpower. When he encountered Facility AuditMate at an APPA show, he realized he had found a solution.

"I saw right away that the program would be easy to use and to manage," he recalls. "And I liked the idea that Diversified Intelligence, the creators of the program, had the capability to undertake the facility audit." He engaged Diversified Intelligence to conduct an initial audit that included administration buildings and student housing and to input the data into the program. The Board of Trustees were so impressed by the results that he went on to ask Diversified Intelligence to complete the rest of the campus.

From Beebe's point of view, having Facility AuditMate on the job has been a big plus. "With Facility AuditMate up and running, we can control deferred maintenance to our advantage," he observes. "It keeps us focused. We look at areas that it suggests need attention and make our evaluation. In many cases, I already knew where our problem areas were. Facility AuditMate played an important role by validating and confirming our estimates."

Facility AuditMate has also helped Beebe work with the school's financial officers to understand the deferred maintenance cycle. "You can project any number of years into the future, giving people the ability to understand our funding needs," he says.

Beebe sees himself making even more use of Facility AuditMate as time goes by. "The more you work with it, the more convenient and powerful it is," he declares. "We will be integrating it more and more into our operations."

Bill Meneeley, director of Buildings and Grounds at St. Anne's-Belfield, a thriving private school in Charlottesville, Virginia, found himself in a dilemma that's familiar to most facilities managers. "Like many other institutions, we had built up a backlog of deferred maintenance," he comments. Now, thanks to Facility AuditMate, Meneeley is well on his way to securing the commitment and resources to solve at least part of his problem.

Meneeley, a retired Navy captain, has twelve buildings on his watch, some of them brand new, but others like Randolph Hall older stalwarts. "I conduct inspections on both of our campuses on a weekly basis," Meneeley reports. "In the process, I've accumulated a list of projects for us to work on." Randolph Hall, with classrooms for the school's upper school students, was high up on that list. Meneeley's challenge was to find a way to translate Randolph Hall's deferred maintenance needs into facts and figures that members of the school's Building and Grounds Committee could understand.

That's where Facility AuditMate reports came into play. Meneeley had asked Diversified Intelligence to conduct a detailed facility audit of Randolph Hall so that he could get a better understanding of the deferred maintenance that needed to be done, but he hadn't given much thought to using Facility AuditMate reports as a communication tool. In the midst of a recent Building and Grounds Committee meeting, though, Meneeley realized he could use these reports to make his case for a Randolph Hall renovation.