Moorpark College Curbs Emergencies Using ARC Facilities Apps

Home Customers stories Moorpark College Scores an A+ for Facility Innovation & Resourcefulness

Challenges

The biggest challenge facing John Sinutko, the Director of Facilities, Maintenance & Operations at Moorpark College, is manpower.

With just 42 team members including custodians, Sinutko is responsible for 156 acres and 800,000 square feet of buildings. Resources are stretched thin.

On top of covering a lot of ground, Sinutko was facing documentation challenges, with thousands of sheets of plans located in their plan room, some dating back to 1965.

Paper was stored in rolls, stacks, and in file drawers, creating a giant mess.

Campus activities include special events, athletics, performing arts and an on-site zoo where students are trained to teach, train, and care for zoo animals. With about 10,000 students enrolled, Sinutko had serious concerns about disaster responsiveness.

Sinutko also wanted a way to provide local police and local agencies with the ability to access building plans, emergency plans and information about shutoff and fire extinguisher locations.

"We have a humongous mass of documentation,” said Sinutko. “I was having nightmares about what we’d do if we had to find shutoffs during a disaster.

Solution

Sinutko had been seeking a way to switch to moving from paper to electronic format when the ARC Facilities solution came across his desk.

He liked the ability to archive, access, and update his own facility’s information to assist current team members and help new technicians “inheriting” positions from retirees.

“A lot of people didn’t want to walk away from paper because they’re used to it. But I felt strongly about moving into a new era,” said Sinutko.

Results

The ARC Facilities services team picked up, scanned, indexed, and used optical character recognition to retrieve more than a thousand DVDs, and thousands of digital and paper documents, some of which required a special mold clean up treatment.

In the process, ARC Facilities found massive duplication, which they eliminated.

Now Moorpark College can quickly and easily access all this information, which is now organized, from an app.

With the ARC Facilities solution implemented, Sinutko can improve emergency communications with important local resources.

With immediate access to building plans accessible via mobile devices, Sinutko is seeing positive results, including:

The ability to edit, not just index information once it’s been scanned.
Having the capability to drop-in locations, e.g. valves, and include as-builts on mobile devices.
Mapping out emergency equipment such as defibrillators.
Eliminating traveling to and from a paper-packed and disorganized plan room.

Conclusion

Information Access No Longer a Zoo at Moorpark

Sinutko anticipates a portion of the team retiring within the next five years, so he’s enthusiastic about creating a seamless knowledge transfer flow and smooth succession planning with the help of ARC Facilities.

“ARC Facilities is willing to help with onboarding our facility guys,” said Sinutko. “We’re now putting in an order for iPads, so everyone will also have mobile devices with our facilities information all loaded up.”

Point and Click Visual Navigation

Access to as-builts, shut-off maps and equipment locations means technicians can quickly resolve any maintenance or emergency situations.

To learn more about how ARC Facilities can make facility information access easier for your team request a demo today.