Keeping county history alive creating digital pathways for transformation

When Ben Treppa took over as Deputy Director of Macomb County’s Facilities Department, one of the events that started him on a path toward digital transformation was a fire in one of their buildings.

Macomb County is Michigan’s third most populated county, with a population of more than 865,000 residents and growing. Macomb County was formally organized on January 15, 1818, as the third county in the Michigan territory. Major growth occurred between 1950 and 1970, when over 440,000 people were added to Macomb County's population. Many county facility expansions and renovations have taken place over the years.

Today, Treppa and his team are responsible for maintaining about 24 buildings, encompassing around two million square feet, including courthouses, an adult jail, a juvenile jail, a medical examiner, county health department. His department also handles all the internal county projects, including building construction and renovation.

“The smoke damage was very bad because it was an old building. We had to move all our documents out of that building into a different office space. I realized we had a major paper problem – a lot of duplications, missing prints, missing pages, missing specifications. Just a lot of sooty paper spread out all over the place,” he said

One of the first steps in Macomb County’s metamorphosis was to have ARC Facilities scan in all historical and current building documents, to prevent institutional knowledge from escaping, driven by a mass exodus of people retiring.

While Treppa’s team is now relatively stable, he’s concerned about the future and about all the knowledge they’ve acquired.

“What am I going to do when I’m still here and legacy team members are gone?” he said. “I started seeing that legacy slip away, especially during COVID, which really got me on this path of planning a future where we have that information readily available.”

ARC Facilities professionals scan, upload, and organize every piece of information about your building so you get the most out of our mobile platform. We also provide comprehensive support, training, and continuous updates to your content. Services include:

• Pick up, inventory, and securely transport documents.
• Preps and scan paper documents at one of our 190 processing centers
• Uploads digital and paper documents onto the platform.
• Automatically analyzes, organizes, and links all your information.
• Identifies any duplicates or missing documents.
• Supports updating your app with new procedures, equipment details and building information.
• Delivers training for your team.
• Consults on facilities best practices.

Treppa is currently using ARC Facilities for Building Plans and Emergency Information.

The Building Plans module provides instant mobile access to as-builts, which are organized and continuously updated. Technicians can locate videos, and operating procedures in seconds. They can also mark up plans and share the changes with colleagues or contractors with the tap of a finger from their mobile devices.

Using the Emergency Plans module, technicians can locate emergency equipment and act quickly by sharing information with first responders to lower risk during an emergency event. Anyone can remotely locate information on shut-offs and how to operate them.

His staff in the field all have tablets that allow them to pull up building and equipment information while they're at job sites. They can investigate where ducts may run and where the plumbing may run.

“I kind of knew ARC Document Solutions because they were on-site for a scanning project and they approached me about the facilities management piece,” said Treppa. And so that's when we went on a long path to really scan in all our building documents, historical and current, and try to wrap our heads around all the information that we had at the county.”

All of Macomb County’s plans, building information, project specifications, owner's information, and warranties have been digitized and are accessible via mobile devices.

Treppa has also just started to get their architects and engineers added as ARC Facilities users to access historical drawings, like the county jail which was built in the early 1950s.

Treppa is also in the process of linking their work order system into ARC Facilities, where users can hyperlink documents from ARC Facilities so when their staff goes up to a major piece of equipment, they scan a QR code, and it pulls up critical equipment information. It starts the work order for them, but it also pulls up the hyperlink information for the blueprints and warranty information and manual information from ARC.

What Treppa likes best about the solution is the ease of access to information.

Now that they’ve “gone mobile,” photos can be texted and team members no longer need to come into the office in the middle of a job to find plans, owner manuals, part numbers, and so on because they have it at their fingertips.

“Everyone's kind of doing more with less, you know, as we struggle to fill these positions,” said Treppa. “The more efficient we can make everyone's jobs, the better for everybody.