James Madison University (JMU) is a public university within the
Commonwealth of Virginia. The University was founded in 1908 and has almost
19,000 students enrolled. There are 154 buildings on the campus, spread across
696 acres of land, and over six million square feet of facilities.
JMU’ s Facilities Management Mission Statement is to be dedicated to excellence
in customer service and to provide quality facilities-related support to the
university community. The University wanted to involve their entire campus
community in a well-defined, consistently used and commonly understood
process for planning and decision-making. This process would emphasize
accountability and tie resource allocation to institutional effectiveness.
The University needed to plan for a sufficient amount of resources to
achieve their goals. They needed to develop a process for decision-making
and planning that emphasized accountability, as well as a set of tools with
which to execute that process. JMU also wanted to tie resource allocation to
institutional effectiveness, with the ultimate goal of providing a safe, attractive,
service-oriented campus. Safety and attractiveness are major selling points for
institutions of higher learning, such as JMU, that must stand out for potential
students in an increasingly competitive landscape.
A related challenge came to the fore in 2005, when the Commonwealth of
Virginia instituted a mandate (Item C-194.10 of Chapter 951 of the 2005 Acts of
Assembly) that says “Institutions of higher education and other agencies shall
perform facility condition assessments (FCA) of their facilities as quickly and as
comprehensively as feasibly possible.”
In 2005, state agencies and institutions within the Commonwealth of Virginia
began implementation of FICAS (Facilities Inventory Condition Assessment
System). As a result, James Madison University deployed VFA.facility® to meet
the government’s FICAS requirements, and to be eligible to obtain funding.
FICAS provided an overall snapshot of all of the facilities belonging to JMU in a
reliable, centralized database. JMU can now extract and dissect data across an
entire portfolio, for particular buildings, and even for specific systems or types of
problems. FICAS also calculated the industry-standard Facility Condition Index
(FCI), which is determined by dividing the total cost of existing requirements over
the current replacement value of facilities. JMU’s facility portfolio had an average
FCI of 0.32 – an FCI of over 0.10 means that the portfolio has conditions that
should be addressed to meet the goals of “Best in Class” facilities management.
Using the FCI for individual buildings, the University was able to decide
which buildings to renovate and which to replace, and had clear data
regarding what requirements to address and how to reduce the FCI.
FICAS provided the facilities management team with industry-standard lifecycle
and cost data based on RSMeans, and allowed prioritization of projects and
volume cost savings through bundled projects.
The facilities information in FICAS helped the University to understand the
magnitude of deferred maintenance costs. The facilities management department
became more involved with the process of capital planning. FICAS created a
reduced time frame for creating budgets, improved forecasting, and provided
readily available, comprehensive reports that enabled the facilities management
team to get “buy-in” from the University leadership as well as building
occupants. It also made it possible for the University to maintain or reduce the
Facility Condition Index across the portfolio.
The software allowed the University to create sophisticated budget scenarios and
reports which helped with strategic analysis, making it possible for the capital
planning process to be integrated with the University’s strategic planning efforts.
