Interim Vice President for Safety & Facilities Baxter Goodly sent the following message to staff earlier this month.

Happy New Year, Team!

I trust your time away from campus gave you a chance to recharge and that you’re ready to tackle 2024’s fresh challenges.

We had a very productive 2023 – and I do mean productive. Our Facilities team completed over 23,000 service call phases since August. That’s a big number indicating all the hard work our staff is doing each and every day, but I actually want to focus on the decrease we’ve seen since implementing zones in Facilities Buildings and Grounds. During the 2021 Fall Semester when we were still primarily operating as individual shops, we had almost 2,500 more service calls. More impressively, the average time it took to complete service calls dropped from 10.59 days in November 2021 (the month we began the shift to zones) to 4.23 days in November 2023. I attribute these decreases to both the preventive maintenance and the increased teamwork that have resulted from moving to zones.

FBG accounts for the majority of our staff, but we can’t forget about the tremendous contributions from the rest of FPCM.

• Transportation and Logistics expertly transitioned us to a new shuttle provider with little disruption and completed almost 1,600 phases between trash removal, furniture projects, and relocation services.
• Utilities, Energy, and Engineering modernized elevators in several buildings and got to work on a cogen optimization project. They also had high profile achievements like the approval of the Southland Energy project expected to save us 1.5 million dollars in the first year and an energy management pilot program at Smith Center now expanding to more buildings on campus.
  Construction Management and Campus Planning earned notable publicity as well from renovations at the Smith Center, the solar system now operating at Thurston, and prominent renovations in Duques.
• These accomplishments leave no doubt we’re well prepared to take on all the projects we have slated for the Spring Semester. FBG has begun work on a strategic plan for the next two years that will involve input from many on the team. Across Foggy Bottom, we have HVAC work scheduled, including refurbishing systems in both Ross Hall and Academic Center, replacing the heating and cooling systems in Amsterdam, and restoring building services in certain parts of Gelman.

Finally, we are continuing our efforts to refresh AiM and FixIt. These systems touch every part of FPCM, meaning successful completion of this project is critical. Once we’ve reached the finish line, we’ll have created a system that better empowers our customers, increases technician productivity, helps managers improve operations, and strengthens our ability to collect and report on data and trends. We’ve already spent over 650 hours on this project already and I thank all those who have helped ensure we stay on schedule and on budget.

Your participation in these projects and our daily operations is essential. Without you, we can’t serve GW, let alone continue our journey to improve our processes. Thanks for everything you’re doing and here’s to a fantastic year ahead!

All the best,
Baxter