Source: My UM
At around eleven o’clock one Sunday night, Hugo was enjoying a TV show after tucking his kid into bed, when he received a phone call which sent him rushing out of home. It turned out that he was called to assist with an emergency repair of water supply piping on the new campus. Hugo told us that being asked to return to the campus for emergency repairs has become so commonplace for him these days that his family have already gotten used to it.
Hugo works in the Facility Operations and Maintenance Section under the Campus Management Office. He started working on the new campus last September, responsible for following up on repair requests and coordinating efforts of the building contractor and the property management company. Every day, the Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) receives requests for repairs and then generates automatic notifications to the property management company accordingly so the company can send people to perform onsite inspection and repair. Hugo’s daily work involves following up on the progress of the repairs and providing technical support where necessary. Sometimes he needs to contact the building contractor if repairing is the contractor’s responsibility. Currently, the property management company is still not very familiar with the facilities on the new campus, so Hugo and his colleagues have to provide onsite assistance most of the time.
“The facilities have passed quality inspection, but only after you use it for a while will you be able to tell if it is working properly,” says Hugo. Also a user of the new campus, Hugo completely understands how inconvenient it can be when things are not working properly. But often Hugo becomes the person on whom the other colleagues vent their frustration. “Again and again we have heard similar complaints along the lines of ‘how come such-and-such is still not fixed?’” Hugo says. “But what the colleagues don’t understand is that over a million different kinds of materials were used in new campus construction, and many of the parts were custom-made and are not readily available on the market. Often, we need to contact the building contractor or the suppliers to get the right parts, which usually need to be mass produced on a custom-made basis before they can be delivered to us. These factors all affect how much time it takes to get the repair done.”
To make sure that every user of the new campus can make repair requests at any time, the Campus Management Office (CMO) not only has set up a special hotline to handle requests during office hours, but has established the CMMS which can receive requests 24 hours a day. Requesters can track the progress of the repairs on the system. Ever since the new academic year started, the CMO has arranged for staff to be on call after work on a rotating basis. It has also requested the property management company to arrange for workers to be on duty throughout the night, to make sure that there will be sufficient workers available in case of the need for emergency repairs.
In terms of facilities operation and maintenance, Hugo feels the new campus is by far the largest and most challenging project in Macao, because of the size of the campus and the numbers of outdoor facilities and users. But he believes that through constant improvement, there will be fewer and fewer problems, and UM members will come to love the new campus more and more.
