Optimising facility management and the management of new student housing sites

Here are the ways in which CampusX, through its CX brand, has improved the efficiency of maintenance activities on managed buildings and ensured that active construction sites stick to their timetables.

8 facilities managed, 3,400 rooms throughout Italy, 4,800 beds occupied.

CampusX is a leading Italian company in the Student Housing sector.

With facilities nationwide in Rome, Florence, Bari Chieti, Turin, Venice and Milan (opening in September) CampusX embodies a hybrid hospitality model that combines the highest housing standards with the experience of a vibrant international community.

The challenge: Supporting maintenance activities and control on site

Since they manage entire buildings for student housing, the CampusX team is constantly involved in building-maintenance activities, both routine and unexpected. These facility management activities (which CampusX outsource but manage internally) involve numerous resources and dozens of interventions every week, and CampusX are responsible for keeping the entire operation under control.

This used to be achieved through constant reports, generated manually every time. They would download images and text from smartphones and then enter them into tables on Word files with transcription of descriptions and details for each one.

In what ways can we save time in these activities and automate them?

In addition to property management, a dedicated team also follows the development of new campuses starting from the design and construction phase – from the project to the building site and right through to the handover of the property. In this case, progress control and quality control are decisive activities in order to meet delivery deadlines.

How can we avoid continuous inspections and streamline snag list activities?

The solution: improve control of facility management activities and adherence to site schedules with PlanRadar

Cristina De Luca, Energy, Property & Maintenance Manager, Southern Area, at CampusX, personally contributed to the search for a tool to integrate into her daily work. During her search, she soon came across PlanRadar.

“We realised that we needed help to enable us to move away from pen and paper. We were looking for an easy and intuitive tool that was within everyone’s reach: PlanRadar not only met these needs, but also offered a good price for the services offered“.

From then on, PlanRadar became the go-to support not only for Cristina who was managing the maintenance of the active structures in Central and Southern Italy, but also for the Construction Manager on the other team who follows the properties under construction (which at the time of writing are two new campuses in Milan).

The result: a single platform that centralises the activities of two teams, saving time and resources

PlanRadar was quickly integrated into the daily activities of CampusX, although the tasks carried out by the teams are different. Cristina De Luca, Energy, Property & Maintenance Manager, tells us about its use from an operational point of view: “I use PlanRadar for the maintenance of buildings in Central and Southern Italy for periodic inspections. It is invaluable for both ordinary maintenance works, which, being outsourced, have to be monitored to ensure that the interventions have been carried out correctly, and unexpected maintenance works, which involves subcontractors and other professionals.

For instance, we recently used the PlanRadar platform to check the solar thermal panels on the Tor Vergata campus in Rome: we did a complete mapping directly on the plans to keep track of which panels needed maintenance and which needed to be replaced”.

Besides facility management, Cristina tells us which ways another team in the company has benefited from using PlanRadar: “Since we have to manage the building, even though CampusX is neither the contractor nor the client, we are involved in the development of the project at 360 degrees and we have to make sure that the schedule is going in the right direction and that the work is completed on time. In this sense, PlanRadar is also used by the Construction Manager of CampusX, mainly for inspections and monitoring the progress of the work, time management and ongoing activities, snag lists and site reports.”