AN iOFFICE
FOUNDED1988
AREAS SERVED Worldwide
WEBSITE www.abb.com
INDUSTRY Automation/Digital Technologies
SQ. FT. 402,000
HEADQUARTERS Zurich, Switzerland
With such a large, global operation, ABB needed to be able to track occupancy levels and inventory needs without relying on guesswork.
With iOFFICE, everything is standardized, transparent and uniform."
With no employee directory or clear system for tracking inventory needs and occupancy levels, a facilities manager in Houston knew something needed to change.
ABB chose the iOFFICE IWMS because it could solve all five of the key challenges the company was facing.
Streamlined services and better information has helped save ABB time and money.
Houston-based Facilities Manager Luis Prado hopes other ABB office locations will embrace iOFFICE.
ABB is a Switzerland-based global corporation with a history spanning more than 120 years. Its success has been driven particularly by a strong focus on research and development. The company maintains seven corporate research centers around the globe, and the resulting R&D investment has yielded significant returns on their record of innovation. Many of today’s most critical technologies were developed or commercialized by ABB. ABB is the world’s largest supplier of industrial motors and drivers, the largest provider of generators to the wind industry and the largest supplier of power grids.
In late 2011, Houston-based Facilities Manager Luis Prado was charged with managing five U.S.-based facilities of ABB’s global operations, among the 150 locations across the country. His work experience and early background in the U.S. military taught him a lot about standardizing technologies and processes and the efficiencies that standardization could bring to a huge global organization. One of the first things Luis realized early on was that he had no clear way to track occupancy levels in each of his facilities. In the existing environment, he could not easily pull the numbers he needed. Ordering telephone lines, phones, physical infrastructure and office equipment for his sites without the exact number of current employees was like guesswork, based on disparate spreadsheets, outdated data and a patchwork of processes. Additionally, there was no current employee directory, no consistent approach to work order systems, inventory, updated floor plans or employee tracking.
Luis decided to propose some changes. He began looking around at what other companies were doing, and recalled his experience with iOFFICE. He looked at all the options in the marketplace and invited several contenders to make presentations to his boss and other key decision makers. iOFFICE was the only system that came close to covering their needs with a single, ready-to-use interface.
ABB chose iOFFICE for its holistic approach that addressed five key challenges:
ABB deployed the iOFFICE platform, a cloud-based, single point of access with multiple functions and support tools for integrated workplace management services. The process was completed by 2013, and implementation began.
At ABB, the iOFFICE conversion took about four months to go live.
“This is all no longer an exercise in complexity. I don’t have to actively corral the process manually to get results. iOFFICE is really on the cutting edge; it just makes sense.”
According to Prado, the way ABB manages IWMS in its Houston facilities has changed dramatically. “Time saved through a real-time directory, work order simplification and asset inventory process optimization is all empowering and revolutionizing the way we manage facilities,” he says.
Processes that used to take hours or days to fix now take minutes to initiate and include the billing history for each asset, plus the detailed repair records and any other relevant data. The iOFFICE system also requires little or no internal IT support. Since the cloud-based software is managed by iOFFICE on its own servers, ABB does not require localized IT support for the tool. In the event ABB has technical issues, they are resolved quickly.
Prado hopes other ABB offices across the United States will embrace the iOFFICE solution, especially when they witness how effective it has been to corral disparate systems and information under a single online application.