CASE: The Facilities Maintenance Problem at Midwest University

to accompany CHAPTER 2: Process Strategy and Analysis

Sean Allen is the manager in charge of facilities maintenance at Midwest University.

Located on a 500-acre tract of land outside St. Louis, Missouri, Midwest University is
home to 15,000 students. Allen is responsible for maintaining all the physical facilities
on campus, which comprise 60 buildings. They include dormitories, academic buildings,
administration and office buildings, two athletic stadiums, and a basketball coliseum. To
carry out this function Allen manages a large, diverse workforce that has traditionally
been segmented by skilled craft into electricians, carpenters, plumbers, painters,
heating and air conditioning specialists, masons, dry wallers, and so on. Allen also is
responsible for the custodial and cleaning crews for each facility.
A recurring nightmare for Allen has been the inability of facilities maintenance to
respond quickly to work-order requests. A review of the data indicated that a response
time of 5 to 10 days was not unusual. This was unacceptable.
Allen applied what he had learned in a series of continuous improvement
workshops that focused on problem identification, data collection and analysis, and
problem resolution. He soon discovered that 85 percent of the work-order requests took
less than an hour to handle. Furthermore, almost 40 percent of the requests were for
routine maintenance items such as clogged drains, burned-out light bulbs, and loose
towel racks. His analysis led him to the conclusion that an ineffective organizational
structure was a primary cause of the long response times.
Facility maintenance personnel were grouped by craft and centrally located at the
physical plant offices. As work orders were received, Allen would try to prioritize the
requests and allocate craft personnel to fix the problem. Scheduling work to be done
was complicated. Both the importance of the job and the location had to be considered.
Maintenance personnel often spent a large portion of their time traveling back and forth
across campus, going from one job to the next.
Allen also discovered that jobs frequently could not be completed because more
than one type of craft was required. For instance, repairing a set of wall-mounted
bookshelves in a dormitory room required both a carpenter and a painter. Personnel in
each craft were scheduled independently.
As Allen thought about what to do, he kept coming back to what he had learned
in the continuous improvement workshops about “getting closer to the customer” and
establishing cross-functional work teams that focus on processes, not outputs. A new
structure with enhanced job responsibilities might just be the answer. The big questions
were “What kind of organizational structure would make sense?” and “How could he
minimize time spent traveling back and forth across campus and more effectively utilize
his skilled craftspeople?”

Finally, there was the issue of implementation. After he had designed a new
organizational structure and established new job responsibilities, how could he get the
facilities maintenance personnel to support the changes? One phrase kept going

1
through Allen’s mind: “You get what you measure.” In addition, any reorganization
would mean a realignment of employee performance evaluation and recognition
procedures.

QUESTIONS
1. How would you restructure the facilities maintenance organization at Midwest
University?
2. What can Sean Allen do to alleviate the problem of excessive travel time for work
crews?
3. As Allen redesigns job responsibilities, how should he evaluate his personnel’s
performance? What should he measure? How should he reward employees?

Source: This case was prepared by Dr. Brooke Saladin, Wake Forest University, as a basis for classroom discussion.