Here’s how it happened.
Located in Grand Prairie, Texas—a suburb west of Dallas—Grand Prairie Independent School District (GPISD) boasts 43 campuses over a 58-square mile area and serves nearly 30,000 students. Their more than 4,000 staff members each embrace the district’s mission to ensure student success through engaging learning experiences, collaborative leadership, and a focus on maximizing student achievement.
To support such a large, geographically distributed district, the GPISD Maintenance & Operations Department expands the mission by working to provide a safe, secure, and comfortable classroom setting that enhances the learning environment for all students.
Over the past several years, department leadership began to question its approach to facilities management and maintenance management. Thus, they started investigating how they could be more productive while further improving the communication and collaboration across the district.
“We began to realize that our systems were no longer keeping pace with the way we wanted to manage our facilities and maintenance operations,” notes Jeremy Wirth, Assistant Director of Maintenance & Operations at GPISD. The district had relied on two separate systems to facilitate their needs: a work order management system and an event scheduling system. Wirth turned to Danielle Harris, an Auxiliary Systems Coordinator, to review their current challenges and together they realized it was time for a change.
Key challenges
- Existing work order system was complicated for staff members, maintenance, and operations teams
- Support for inventory and warehouse management processes was unfilled across both systems
- Requesters and technicians could only attach one file per work order, limiting the visibility and completeness of work requests
- Event scheduling processes were complex, prone to error, and often resulted in duplicate, overlapping events
- Staff managing work requests were unable to easily comment or keep track of their time spent, limiting resource planning efforts
Outlining goals
The team began to search for new solutions and realized they needed a single system that the entire district could rely on to serve their diverse needs today, and into the future. Wirth explains, “FMX was the only purpose-built solution we found for a K-12 organization that met the majority of our needs and price point.”
The district selected and implemented FMX over an eight week period with the expert guidance of FMX’s Customer Success Team. “It’s been a gamechanger already,” adds Harris. “My job is to ensure the effective system support for the district’s processes and I take that role very seriously,” Harris continues. With more than 40 campuses and thousands of events each year, the district desperately needed a solution that supported the unique needs of K-12 organizations.
Key results
- Single solution to support facilities, maintenance, operations, event scheduling, and more, district-wide.
- Reduced operational costs through systems consolidation, improved technician productivity, and process efficiencies.
- Improved ease-of-use for all staff members, ensuring processes are supported effectively with fewer user errors.
- Streamlined event scheduling processes by eliminating conflicts, allowing users to edit and change dates and times, and improving communication with all parties.
- Reduced inventory fulfillment times by 75% through improved approval, pulling, and delivery processes.
Note: Due to inefficiencies caused by COVID-19, Grand Prairie anticipates seeing even greater results with FMX when business operations return back to normal.
Achieving success
Harris explains, “With the COVID-19 pandemic in full swing, we decided to use our time wisely and upgrade our system’s support. The FMX team made the process easy by managing the migration processes for our existing systems, training our staff, and ensuring every detail was accounted for. And when we reached out for help, we received it immediately or within an hour. That wasn’t just for the implementation but from the beginning of working with FMX. I’ve never seen better customer service!”
FMX is fully implemented and supports the entire district’s needs. District leadership, staff, and students alike can rest assured that key processes are supported effectively through a single system of record that is easy-to-use by everyone. “FMX has helped us unify our district and set us up for more streamlined operations following the pandemic. We will continue to enhance our operations in the years to come. FMX has raised the bar for facilities, maintenance, and operations solutions for K-12 organizations,” Wirth concludes.
