Cherokee Nation Businesses is the business entity of the Cherokee Nation, which consists of more than 300 buildings – including medical facilities, museums, and gaming and hospitality venues – spread out over 14 counties in Northern Oklahoma.
Management provides oversight to ensure that projects achieve expected results, represent good value for money and are compliant with policies, laws, and ethical standards.
Multiple construction projects generate tons of documentation which must be stored, yet accessible for contracting, legal, construction management, design and facility maintenance teams.
“There were points where we couldn’t even locate the information because projects were so old. That was a big problem,” said one manager.
In cases where they could not find the basic design build documents, there was always the danger of finding “hidden” pipelines and gas lines because they couldn’t find the documentation. Busted water and gas lines are potentially dangerous, costly to repair and impact safety – especially if they’re difficult to locate.
With so much construction going on, facilities teams were equally impacted by information mismanagement. Because facilities teams are ultimately responsible for prolonging the life of buildings, their role is critical for building owners.
When O&M documentation and emergency plans are unavailable, facilities teams can’t do their jobs properly.
“Document control was the primary cause of disconnect going from construction to facilities maintenance,” said a team leader.
The organization was familiar with digitizing and scanning documentation, but they needed a tool to quickly find, share, update, and organize decades of documents. Many of the staff were already using mobile devices like iPads, so it seemed like one piece of the puzzle was already in place. Cloud storage was the next piece of the puzzle. Transitioning 100% of both digital and paper documentation to the cloud created access to this information for all.
The problem wasn’t that information wasn’t available, it was just that data had many “homes” including computers, books, binders and hard drives. In some cases, printed information was hand delivered to construction and building sites where it was promptly lost or misplaced.
Results
The ARC Facilities team did a thorough physical survey of the many properties and buildings, combined with scanning, collecting and organizing paper documents and electronic media, uploading documents to the platform, applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning processes, and photographing shut-offs, emergency equipment and QR codes on equipment.
“From project to project, the platform saves Cherokee Nation tens of thousands of dollars once you started getting into it, so you can address having things redrawn or rescanned by architects and then overall time spent in researching and trying to find documents,” said a team leader. “Now, we don’t have to pay the architect to go back in and create the floor plan. That could have easily cost us over $100,000 on a property with multiple buildings.”
The solution grew to include the ability to hyperlink documents so facilities could see where the layers were and track upgrades, modifications, and remodels. Mapping equipment helps everyone see both emergency equipment and shut-offs.
With expansions inevitable, growth a constant, and construction and maintenance ongoing, fast access to information is vital across the Cherokee Nation landscape.
Learning lessons from experience and conquering problems with sustainable technology solutions has long-term positive benefits for Cherokee Nation Businesses.
Managing facilities and construction projects is all about the details. With detailed plans, drawings, and photos always available from one single source of truth, great leaps in productivity, effectiveness, and control become yours.