College of the Sequoias Building & Emergency Information in the Palm of Your Hand

When the pandemic hit in March of last year, Woods, who is the Dean of Facilities at College of the Sequoias, reduced staff to just a bare bones crew.

With so many unknowns involved, he didn’t want people exposed to each other. When the crew ramped up to 24 hours a week, Woods alternated staggering schedules to limit exposure. The college is planning to reopen in the fall of this year.

Everyone is busy with preventive maintenance on the aging buildings but there’s always a surprise that pops up, like the time a valve handle broke off causing a geyser to shoot up in the sky. Fortunately, an experienced team member found the shut-off before the campus was flooded.

"Our number one concern is roof leaks. If it rains, something is going to leak. It’s just a matter of how quickly you can find it and how quickly you can resolve the situation,” said Woods.

With resources stretched to the max, Woods needed a solution to a nagging problem plaguing his crew – lack of access to facility building information.

If everyone could access the shut-off via mobile devices, there’d be less reliance on team member experience and troubleshooting could be done remotely.

As Woods began to consider a solution to address scattered building plans, some digitized and some still on paper, he learned about ARC Facilities, a built space technology innovator.

“The reason I contacted ARC Facilities in the first place was to be able to document all of our emergency shut-offs,” said Woods.

A team was organized to walk the campus, gauge square footage, identify key locations, pick up and scan documentation, then extract building intelligence via machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The transformation from chaos to control was swift, immediately impactful, and non-disruptive to the team’s normal routine. Now, O&Ms, evacuation plans, as-builts and maintenance reports can be found and shared with just a tap and a swipe.

“The ARC Facilities app allows us to be everywhere at once,” said Woods. “Having that information in the palm of your hand helps our staff cover more ground, be more responsive and more efficient.”

When it comes to documentation, there’s information on paper and in digital form and it’s all over the place.

Using the ARC Facilities technology platform, Woods and his team have better access to information and can share that information out, not only with team members, but with outsiders as well. Offline access is also valuable. With information loaded directly on the phone or iPad, it doesn’t matter if Wi-Fi is available or not.

Woods and his team also decided that it would be great to see inside every single room, so they dropped pins on the floor plan and took photos from different angles to be able to document just what it looks like from inside.

Armed with this data, team members can better prepare for work orders by pulling up a picture of that room to identify material finishes, lighting specs, and other interior details before visiting the space.

“The ARC emergency module is the perfect way for us to be able to gather hundreds of years of collective knowledge from all of our staff, document it, and put it in a format that’s easily accessible and can be easily communicated,” said Woods.

Every second counts when you’re responsible for the health and safety of people in buildings – whether it’s a sprawling college campus, a multi-floor hospital building or a school district. With building drawings, emergency plans and maintenance information quickly and easily accessible, crews can be more productive and more responsive to their constantly changing environment and infrastructure.

“When you have this information, you can sleep better at night knowing that you know where to find it,” said Woods.