SUCCESS STORY

As the world leader in gases for industry, health and the environment, the Air Liquide Group is operating in 80 countries with more than 43,600 employees. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, American Air Liquide’s U.S. operations support more than 5,000 employees in approximately 200 locations, and yet, facility maintenance requests were still being received via telephone, email and personal interaction. Completed requests weren’t being recorded or tracked, and management didn’t have the ability to ensure or verify customer satisfaction for the facility services being routinely performed.

As a result, in the summer of 2011, American Air Liquide’s corporate facility manager was tasked with developing an operational plan for implementing a standardized process for not only receiving facility requests, but also for quantifying the tasks required to complete each service within the request. The new process would have to track which team members and how many team members were necessary to complete a requested service from start to finish. Above all, this new process would have to establish performance benchmarking that would allow management to proactively forecast facility resources in the future.

American Air Liquide’s new facility management team quickly determined that iOFFICE, Inc. would be able to provide an open architecture, software as a service (SaaS) web portal with the desired customization for producing a robust menu of service requests specific to AAL, accessible to all facility occupants both nationally and globally, with benchmarking tools already in place to meet AAL’s reporting goals and requirements.

IMPLEMENTATION

• In conjunction with the iOFFICE implementation team, AAL implemented the Service Request Module to provide a centralized queue for receiving service requests from all facilities, while displaying requests by type, building and request location, time submitted, requestor and assigned technician(s), along with current status of each request.
• With one click from the company intranet, occupants can access the service portal, submit requests and receive status updates via email to view resolutions provided by the technicians as they complete each request.
• Each facility can dispatch service requests to on-site staff and off-site vendors while documenting the waiting, start and stop times of each request.
• Facility teams also have configured customized scheduled tasks that generate automated requests for monthly, quarterly and annual preventive maintenance tasks, providing local, regional and even corporate management with a comprehensive view of each facility’s service activity in real time.

RESULTS

Corporate management can now understand the volume of activity and type of requests being received per site and as a complete organization. Benchmarking is now available by service type and by assigned operator(s). Occupants can easily submit requests, monitor statuses and see final resolutions. After experiencing a seamless implementation process and being extremely pleased with the ease of use by both facility teams and occupants alike, American Air Liquide’s corporate management quickly recognized the value added by having access to accurate, real-time operational statistics and wanted to expand the scope of iOFFICE services being utilized. They immediately began implementation of the Space Module for their Houston area offices. With the expanded iOFFICE services in place, AAL can now actively manage occupant and space data while capturing and reporting data on space utilization for more than 270,000 square feet of corporate office space.