City University of New York (CUNY):
Twenty Urban Colleges Centralized
With ARCHIBUS

The facilities of City University of New York (CUNY) are as diverse—and dispersed—as the five boroughs in which they are found.

CUNY is a consortium made up of twenty campuses, more than 300 buildings on 640 acres, 26 million square feet of facilities space, and 450,000 students. That makes it the largest consortium of its kind in the U.S. and one that, had a facilities management challenge to match. CUNY's then-new Assistant Director for Space Management, Deborah Lott, found a network of aging, and incompatible facilities management databases and no uniform standards for managing its many properties.

Lost In Space

With over 300 buildings—housing 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, two graduate schools, a law school, and The Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education—the scope of CUNY's physical assets was vaguely understood. But their configurations, conditions, and allocations were not, says Lott, now CUNY's Associate Director for Space Management.

In order to implement ARCHIBUS, CUNY launched an encyclopedic cataloging of CUNY facilities in a survey conducted by architecture students over the course of three years. The resulting floor plans were drawn in AutoCAD® and, along with accompanying room data, were then incorporated into ARCHIBUS at CUNY's Central Office, which hosts twenty ARCHIBUS "projects," or databases, one for each campus. Just as important, Lott implemented uniform space management procedures across the sprawl of campuses.

To also facilitate the transfer of work orders and other information, the plan was to have all locations use the ARCHIBUS Work Wizard application that incorporated a Web front-end for submitting work requests and e-mail notifications of work request status changes.

ARCHIBUS is now installed at most of the campuses plus Central Office, and primarily used for building operations and space management.

New York Sets the (Space) Standards

To ensure information is up-to-date and in the right form, CUNY's Central Office produces a Space Management Standards Book with all reference tables in ARCHIBUS based on standards set for Department and Division, Room Category and Type, Room Use, Drawing Standards, and Update Procedures. Architectural and space allocation information must also be kept up-todate, adds Lott, and so drawings are updated using "As-Builts," the AutoCAD drawings that are received upon completion of larger projects. Smaller projects, on the other hand, get site surveys that collect or verify information about the site.

Successful Space Planning: Allocation, Allocation, Allocation

Plan review, the CUNY Central Office planners need to understand the campus' current space usage/square footage allocated to the different academic functions. Understanding classroom utilization rates helps in planning the mix of rooms at a campus in support of its projected growth.

Using Crystal Reports®, data from ARCHIBUS and the CUNY data warehouse are combined to create various reports providing information on the Hourly Fill Rate (how many of the available hours the rooms were used), Available Station Fill Rate (how many of the total available seats in the rooms were used) and the Utilized Rooms Station Fill Rate (of the rooms used, how many of those seats were filled). "It's a much smoother and more efficient process than it was in the past because every time there is a Master Plan, we can connect the space data with other information, such as the student data, for that campus," reports Lott.

New Uses: Short Order Reports

With ARCHIBUS centralization, extra demands can now be quickly met. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, Lott got a call requesting to know "all of your buildings that could serve as a temporary shelter where we could set up beds. With twenty campuses all in one central database, I could just go in and say, 'show me this type of space,' such as a gymnasium that's larger than 3,000 square feet, and I'm able to secure the information quickly," notes Lott. "Every day we're asked to come up with things that no one ever asked before, but now we can answer them quickly because the information is easily accessible and accurate. As time goes on, now that we've consolidated the data we'll find more and more useful applications."

ARCHIBUS Helps Increase A21 Funding

"One of the things I like best about ARCHIBUS," adds Lott, "is that it's flexible and the data is easily portable to other systems. Any changes we've had to make are easy to do. One of the things I was adamant about is that we use it out-of-the-box as much as possible."

The fact that ARCHIBUS can so easily interface with other software led to the support of a Research Foundation system that collects grant information (A21). The Research Foundation is a private, not-for-profit educational corporation chartered by the State of New York. It engages in the post-award administration of private and government-sponsored programs at CUNY where annual activity has reached $300 million. The Foundation developed a Web site to collect grant information based on the ARCHIBUS room data.

Incorporating that room data increased the total square footage reported for calculation of the indirect cost rate by 26.9%. It also increased the total research square footage reported, resulting in a 37.9% increase in direct funding.

Today, thanks to ARCHIBUS, CUNY's facilities are managed as a streamlined, multi-layered "city-within-a-city" with multiple sites and systems functioning at an optimal level of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.