Trinity College Cambridge

Trinity College Cambridge has nearly 500 properties totalling 380,000 m2. The Estates department, which is part of the Facilities Management Directorate, needed a comprehensive system for managing these, principally for maintenance and service through a Helpdesk and Work Orders approach. "We do refurbishment work, and architectural and engineering and clerical work for new buildings. But we needed something mostly for PPM – the planned preventive maintenance – and we wanted something that would improve on the functionality of the existing stand-alone helpdesk." Jeff Ingram from the Department of Estates is explaining what Planon means at Sheffield University.

Not just plonking a system on your desk

When it came to selection criteria, we looked at four options. Among other things, the link to MICAD was very important for us: we had space details in MICAD and the old helpdesk system, but there was absolutely no communication between them. We were perfectly happy to keep MICAD as core data, however, and Planon provided a link via XML." Ingram is positive about the way Planon tackled his department's problems. "The other thing that was really missing for the maintenance was a drag-and-drop planner function. We pretty much made the order conditional on it being provided, and they did it! The relationship is good – we're very, very pleased with what we've seen up to now. Especially the implementation process, PIM: none of the others offered that option – Planon doesn't just plonk a system on your desk and expect you to take it from there yourself."

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