ARCHIBUS Solutions Go to Bat for the Melbourne Cricket Club

Founded in 1838, the Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC) is considered the oldest sporting organization in Australia. It’s also one of the largest, with a membership of more than 97,000 and a waiting list of over 160,000. The Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) stadium, which the MCC manages on behalf of the Victorian government, has a total capacity of almost 100,000 enthusiastic fans.

As impressive as the organization’s size, though, is the scope of its sporting interests beyond cricket. The club also fields competitive teams in lawn bowling, golf, rifle, pistol and clay target shooting, lacrosse, tennis, baseball, real tennis, hockey and squash. In its role as MCG ground manager, the club manages approximately 75-80 cricket and Australian Rules Football event days at the Ground every year.

The extent of the MCC’s activities and facilities required an asset management system that could improve oversight of its many building and extensive grounds, with the MCG alone totaling 2,122,783 square feet (197,213 square metres). So it fielded an equally competitive team to meet its asset management challenge when it chose ARCHIBUS and Business Partner ICAD Consultants to create a personalized solution to meet its many needs.

Single Resource Answers Multiple Needs
Prior to searching for an asset management provider, MCC had been managing its facilities using USI’s Event Business Management System and a collection of spreadsheets and paper based systems, says Martin Blake, the MCC’s Facilities Systems Administrator.

That approach proved inadequate for the life-cycle management of MCC asset groups that include building structures, building fabrics, building services, land, plant and equipment.

A review of available vendor solutions was conducted to find the advanced asset management functions that could provide a comprehensive, easily customizable, and centralized system to manage the club’s real estate, facilities, and infrastructure.

“The competitive price of the ARCHIBUS software solution, and the quality of staff from our ARCHIBUS Business Partner, ICAD Consultants, made ARCHIBUS the clear favorite when selecting which solution to implement,” Blake points out.

MCC chose to implement a range of ARCHIBUS applications that included Real Property & Lease Management, Space Management, Condition Assessment, Building Operations Management, and Web Central to create an advanced Web-based system for collecting and distributing asset information.

The ambitious three-phase implementation plan was completed in only one year.

The goal, Blake notes, was to create an integrated asset management system where asset attribute data on all asset groups is stored in a central database accessible from all ARCHIBUS application modules. The system would also have to be integrated with other core corporate applications to facilitate sharing of asset management information across the organization and with the MCC’s key financial application and proposed electronic purchase order system.

Integration for Better Financial Controls
The Melbourne Cricket Club has, for example, integrated ARCHIBUS with SunSystems financial accounting software. The organization’s chart of accounts, supplier list and fixed assets lists are shared between the two systems. The most notable benefit has been the creation of a single asset register, with depreciation charges generated in SunSystems and shared with ARCHIBUS.

Integration to vendor Professional Advantage’s electronic purchase order system, iPOS, is also underway. This will allow the final cost of every Work Order to be passed back to ARCHIBUS to complete the lifecycle costing of MCC assets to track data such as purchase price, depreciation, maintenance costs, and disposal value.

New Asset Insight at Billion-Dollar Facility
The club’s ARCHIBUS implementation, reports Blake, has been a great success in solving the organization’s management challenges by providing key business information that allows the MCC to maintain , monitor, repair, and plan for the future needs of its billion-dollar facility. And that all contributes to creating the best possible experience for the club’s members, patrons, and event promoters.

“The greatest benefit the MCC has seen so far has been a transformation in the efficiency of processing work requests from creation through to work completion,” says Blake.

“Our Facilities Service Center has become more efficient, with work requests submitted via Web Central, key contractors updating work using Web Central, and the sharing of information allowing other departmental staff to access, edit and report on jobs. Our Service Centre has turned around from a hectic, reactive, highly stressed function to a relaxed, efficient and pro-active Service Centre.”

MCC has also seen great advances in its knowledge of the assets it is charged with managing. It has, for instance, witnessed a near-doubling of recorded work requests received and acted upon by the Facilities department. The asset management functionality, furthermore, is providing answers to questions about the asset base that previously could not be answered or were too labor-intensive to find the answers.

“In the future,” adds Blake, “we will be extending our use of ARCHIBUS to utilize the strategic planning capabilities built by ICAD Consultants, and introduce specific auditing tools for tasks such as cleaning audits.

But for now, MCC is enjoying its new-found efficiencies that are producing significant savings and reducing data wild goose chases.

“MCC has arguably avoided adding an additional Service Center operator through the introduction of ARCHIBUS and the efficiencies it has created,” reports Blake. “Hours are saved every week in chasing data and reports that are now easily extracted from the system, whether queries related to Space Management, Works Management or Asset Management.”