Case Studies

The M.D. Anderson Cancer Center is a world class healthcare facility with a mission to eliminate cancer. It is part of the University of Texas healthcare system and is involved in cancer research and the development of new treatments and education. Patients from all corners of the world come to M.D. Anderson and the majority of patients leave the facility cancer free.

The Facility Management group manages the maintenance of 164 buildings on two campuses comprising 9 million square feet. The various maintenance groups are responsible for the welfare of 15,000 employees and hundreds of patients each day. In addition, these buildings must meet regulatory requirements from JCAHO (Hospital accreditation agency) and the state of Texas.

The main campus facilities in Houston are divided up between Patient Care and Research and Education. There are other satellite locations around Houston and a second campus in Bastrop Texas where animal research takes place. All locations are in a single database utilizing key data elements such as ‘work area’ to segregate data. Mainsaver also provides this health care facility with data elements to identify critical assets which helps to prioritize work orders.

There are different maintenance groups all using the common Mainsaver database with different maintenance workflows.  Thirteen maintenance dispatchers enter about 500 corrective work orders each day.  Most of these originate through trouble calls to the Patient Care dispatch phone and are usually completed within 1-2 man-hours.  Fault, cause and action codes have been created for common repair issues such as elevator problems and HVAC complaints.  Shift summary reports are prepared to review the accomplishments of each shift.

Typical Brief work order added in the dispatch module

Mainsaver is also used to generate Preventive Maintenance (PM) work orders. Most PMs are scheduled based on the calendar while some are based on an hour meter. Additionally, Mainsaver Routes are used for inspection rounds. Maintenance Planners use the scheduling functions in Mainsaver to build work schedules for employees. For building retrofits and others projects, multiple work orders may be tied to a common project code.

Fire system Preventive Maintenance record

A central storeroom carries everything from electrical parts to printed materials which are distributed throughout the campus as needed. Mainsaver is used to track the inventory in real time while an Accounting package is used for creating purchase orders. (Lawson)

Consumption patterns for inventory items

Since parts and labor are charged to Mainsaver work orders, Facilities Managers can identify assets that are eating up the Maintenance budget. Fault codes are in use to identify repetitive failures. Funds saved on maintenance can be put to better use at this important institution.

The back end of Mainsaver is a large Oracle database providing instantaneous access to years of work order history and the capability to identify trends.

Through planning materials and inventory control, M.D. Anderson increased traceable inventory stored in store rooms by 24% while virtually eliminating "left over" parts inventories. This traceable inventory in store rooms is immediately accessible to craftsmen. They double the total dollar volume of traceable inventory charged to work orders and have a steady trend of about 7% per month increase. The total inventory valuation has only increased 12.2%. This illustrates that the inventory throughput rate has doubled and that holding time has significantly decreased. Planners have increased the reliability of PM labor estimates by almost 10% as measured by the percent of PM work orders whose actual time charged fell within acceptable variances from the estimates. In addition, the work groups have increased the allocation of labor hours charged to PM work orders by almost 50%.

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