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In-House Standard Practices

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The Facilities Services Department at the UT Knoxville campus has a primary goal of delivering the best possible service to the University and the State of Tennessee at the lowest costs. The department continually improves upon best industry practices in order to support this goal while also maintaining the best cost model, with our employees’ vested loyalty and ownership in the work they provide to the State of Tennessee and to the UT Knoxville campus community.

The information in the following links address specific department practices of the UT Facilities Services Department. This information is but a subset, however, and does not cover the full extent of the UT Knoxville Facilities Services Department’s responsibilities and accomplishments.

Each item shown here is listed with a summary description, and most have additional components and linked documents that the Facilities Services Department provides to detail each point. To provide complete transparency to our customers we welcome you to explore all the links, documents, and pages outlined below.

Departmental Practices Information

Initiated to right-size our workforce, to become more customer focused, to improve management oversight, improve work environments, and increase our proactive maintenance resulting in much more efficient building operations and less system downtime.

Always looking to reduce costs while increasing service through reallocation of savings and implementing other cost-based efficiencies. Operations/Maintenance is currently one of the smallest university expenditures on campus – falling into the bottom four primary expenditures with just a 7% share of the university’s overall budget spending.

We take pride in our Customer-focused service, always looking to increase service and improve customer satisfaction (94% approval, FY14).

We maintain a comprehensive training program, allowing us to cross-train employees which gives them the tools to perform additional types of repairs & services while troubleshooting more quickly, resulting in a lower cost to the university. This also allows us to recruit better, more devoted hires to the University from the start.

Delegated purchasing amounts, contract leveraging, and strategic sourcing all allow us to get system-wide discounts, while still enabling us to utilize local vendors, boosting the entire region’s economy.

We continually prioritize and explore challenges/opportunities to provide the best services at the lowest possible cost.

We maintain nationally award winning programs, LEED certified buildings, Zero Waste recycling initiatives, and consistently avoid increased utilities costs.

We have implemented IWMS (Archibus), which is a globally recognized enterprise computer system with more than 8 million users world-wide (saving their organizations more than $100 billion annually).

We employ industry best practices to create sustainable facility and building management across a broad real estate portfolio, providing ever increasing customer satisfaction in all types of spaces. Types of facilities we service include: technical research buildings, classrooms, offices, residences, agricultural and animal quarter areas, arena/stadium spaces, mechanical areas, library/study spaces, athletic facilities, exhibition areas, daycare builidngs, healthcare and medical areas, secure/hazardous sites, warehouseing space, and more.