Pulteney Grammar School

About the Client

Pulteney Grammar School is a private school in the Adelaide CBD, offering exceptional educational facilities for approximately 900 students, from Early Learning through to Year 12. The school’s inner city campus comprises three sub-schools, various courts, a gymnasium and Nature Play plus 18 hectares of parkland opposite which includes five ovals, 15 tennis courts, a hockey pitch, basketball and netball courts, and boat shed on the Torrens River.

This state-of-the-art campus is designed to provide the perfect environment for student learning, and is one of the things students and parents love about Pulteney. The management and maintenance of that campus therefore, is paramount to delivering on the schools mission to help students prosper.

The opportunity

For Pulteney, implementing a dedicated facilities management solution was closely aligned with their commitment to caring for their campus.

The Pulteney team recognised the need to improve visibility over all open jobs across their campus. With a long-term vision for advanced asset management, they wanted to implement a system that could grow with them.

For Pulteney, a structured and proven onboarding process, and access to ongoing support gave them the confidence to move forward with FMI Works.

Incoming requests from teachers and staff are key to keeping Pulteney’s campus pristine. However, utilising email for incoming requests posed a mounting challenge to keep track of requests that were coming in through multiple channels.

Logistics Manager for Pulteney Grammar, Richard Sexton,explains:

“What we were finding with maintenance requests was staff emailing outdated or defunct email inboxes or sending requests to individual staff members. This made it difficult for us to keep track of those requests, and to provide any updates to the requesters.

From the staff’s perspective, they’ll send off an email and assume it is going to be dealt with. We also saw a lot of duplicate requests, which exacerbated the amount of admin we had to do, we could easily get 13 emails to various inboxes reporting the same issue.”

The journey

When it came to implementing the solution, Richard’s confidence was buoyed by the structured and proven approach taken by the FMI team. Speaking about the onboarding experience for the school, he explains: 

“The FMI team were, without exception, brilliant, it’s all been really good and really easy. Even after onboarding, our account manager sends us easy to digest resources.

I’m finding there’s always someone else who has the same question as me, and so the answers are right there in the help centre. Right down to communications we could send to our staff to help with onboarding, it saved us so much time that we could then use to focus on our side of things.”

Just a few weeks after going live, Pulteney started seeing efficiencies. Within days of the initial announcement, teachers and other staff were logging requests, without the need for training. For Richard, this is a testament to how easy the platform is to use, he says:

“We launched on the first Friday of term, and over the weekend I started seeing requests coming in. We’d sent an email out, announcing the launch and including a few of the FMI resources for requesters and by Monday, I had requests in the system ready to be actioned.

To help drive behavioural change, we’ve said to the staff that we want to know about anything and everything. If they see anything while they’re out and about that doesn’t look exactly right, we want them to immediately just take their phone out and log the request.”

With a streamlined request process in place, the Pulteney team have been able to improve communications processes, saving time on admin, and delivering better service to facility users.

While previously staff were unlikely to receive any communications around their request being received or actioned, they’re now kept in the loop, effectively managing expectations. Richard explains:

“Under the email system, there was a much greater chance of requests being lost. Staff might send an email, and never hear anything back, being left to assume it was just in action by the facilities team.

Now, when a request is submitted, the team members get an automatic confirmation, so they know we’re onto it, and we can easily check the status of that job.

This is great for the duplicate requests, because I can just merge those jobs, and quickly go back to the requester letting them know the job status. I can even get ahead of the duplicates, and send a broadcast message out to the relevant campus.”

Looking to the future

Having achieved a successful rollout of the system to staff across the campus, the team at Pulteney are now thinking about progressively expanding their use of FMI Works to support advanced asset management ambitions.  

Speaking to what the next year looks like, Richard describes a carefully laid plan that will help the team to use the system regularly enough to enrich the data in the system over time.  

“In the next 12 months, ideally, I’d have liked every teacher to have logged something at least once, and we want to start getting into the reporting side of things a bit more.

We should be at a point in the near future, where we can bring up our dashboard in team meetings, look at what is outstanding, what’s been completed, and identify any gaps. We want to be able to see if the hours we’ve allocated for jobs are being used, and if the number of hours of work meets or exceeds the number we have available with our current workforce.

We’ll also be able to look up maintenance histories and start to identify trends. If we keep seeing requests for a particular asset, we can proactively plan for its replacement. We’ve got some bigger ticket assets around the place, and it would be great to have an idea of where to focus our resources.

That’s the stuff that is really exciting, when we can really take our asset management to the next level.”