Baylor School, a 700-acre private co-ed boarding school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, includes about 30 buildings and functions much like a small university. The facilities team runs maintenance, custodial, transportation, security, athletics, events and residential operations. Like many well-established campuses, critical building knowledge lived largely in the heads of experienced technicians.
“Depending on who was working that day depended on what kinds of answers we could get in the moment,” explained Director of Operations and Systems Samantha Green.
The team often relied on longtime staff members to locate shutoff valves, identify panels, explain past renovations, or find historical drawings. Information was stored in binders, paper plans, shared drives, and decades of institutional knowledge had accumulated.
Leadership summarized the growing risk of losing all this experience in one sentence that says it all:
“Mike’s retiring now. He’s going to the beach.”
During planning discussions for renovations to one of Baylor’s oldest campus buildings, a turning point became apparent, as the facilities team, architect, and vendors spent nearly an hour digging through old blueprints from the 1930s trying to locate accurate building information.
That moment triggered a larger realization: “Why isn’t this digitized? Why can’t we just press a button and pull this up?”
Shortly afterward, a catastrophic standpipe ruptured two weeks before the start of school with approximately 70,000 gallons of water flooding the main academic building.
Delays in locating the correct shutoff significantly increased damages.
“It took him 3 minutes to locate the shutoff but those 13 minutes poured thousands of gallons of water into the building,” said Sam.
The final impact:
- Approximately $700,000 in damage
- Classrooms offline for weeks
- Event spaces unusable
- Significant operational disruption before the school year started
Before implementing ARC Facilities, Baylor School faced several widespread facilities management challenges:
- Excessive time searching for information
- Difficulty locating historical drawings and asset information
- Incomplete asset inventories and unclear maintenance histories
- Time intensive shadowing for new technician onboarding
- Instead of proactive planning, reactive maintenance
- Tracking down experienced technicians for answers
Baylor School implemented ARC Facilities to centralize and digitize building information across campus.
The initiative included:
- Digitizing building plans and historical drawings
- Mapping shutoffs and critical assets
- Centralizing equipment information
- Providing mobile access to technicians in the field
- Allowing real-time updates from iPads and mobile devices
Technicians were equipped with iPads so they could instantly access building information from anywhere on campus.
Instead of calling coworkers or driving back to the office, technicians could now:
- Locate valves and shutoffs
- Access equipment records
- View historical information
- Update asset data in real time
- Close work orders more efficiently
Faster Response and Better Operational Visibility
Technicians can now access building information immediately in the field and now they can pull up where all the valves are and where all of the assets are.
Easier Onboarding
New hires no longer need weeks of shadowing just to learn where information lives. Technicians are handed iPads and they quickly get up to speed on all the campus buildings.
Improved Planning and Budgeting
The facilities team gained clearer visibility into assets, maintenance history, and lifecycle planning.
This helped Baylor transition from reactive maintenance toward more proactive operations and preventative maintenance planning.
Better Quality of Life for Staff
The team now updates information in real time, reducing uncertainty and operational friction, and everybody just sleeps a little better at night knowing that the information has been updated.
For Baylor School, centralizing building information became more than a technology initiative. It became a strategy for reducing operational risk, improving response times, protecting institutional knowledge, and helping the campus operate more efficiently every day.
K12 Facilities Operations
In this webinar, David Trask of ARC Facilities speaks with Samantha (“Sam”) Green, Director of Operations & Systems at Baylor School, about the operational challenges of managing a 700-acre campus with aging infrastructure, scattered documentation, and decades of institutional knowledge living in the heads of long-time technicians.