Universities are mini cities, with the Estates and Facilities Management teams in the role of the city council keeping the city running smoothly. As with city councils, Estates and Facilities Management teams are under increasing pressure to deliver on key objectives, such as health and safety or student satisfaction, while reducing running costs. 

Esri’s ArcGIS Platform is proving itself to be a key operational tool in many sectors, allowing teams to work more efficiently. It offers Estates teams a range of solutions to help them with many of their tasks from housing stock to asset management surveys.  However, few Estates teams realise that they have access to Esri software through the Chest Agreement.

The current Esri Chest licence agreement includes a software allocation for administrative use.  This means any activity related to the running of the university and would include many core estate team’s functions.  Let’s look at a few examples of where Estates teams could implement ArcGIS to drive efficiencies.

Campus Maps

What maps are on your universities web site?  Don’t know?  Go and check.  This might be the most over-looked and under-rated element of your university’s website.  It can influence the experience a visitor has when they first arrive on your campus.  The chances are your universities online campus map is either a google map, or a bespoke map.  Let’s look at each in turn:

• Google map – great for most users as it works on smartphones and integrates navigation tools to get users to their destination. However, they can be quite low on detail on campus.
• Bespoke map – generally rich in detail and useful information, but as they are bespoke maps they can quickly become out of date and costly to update.

With an Esri campus map you can have the best of both worlds.  A detailed map of your campus which is easy to update and, critically, that you “control” the data.  Once you have your buildings, roads, carparks and paths in ArcGIS Online you can create multiple maps from the same base data.  You can easily produce maps with the information a user needs and respond to changes on your campus to reduce disruption to users.

Here are some examples:

• University of Kentucky
• University of Maryland
• 3D campus with internal room details

Energy monitoring

Most new buildings are loaded with smart technology.  Esri’s ArcGIS platform allows you to present smart data through interactive maps, which are often the most intuitive way for to explore and understand it.  In the campus map below the University of Massachusetts have integrated smart metering with their campus map. If you click a building you can explore its energy consumption.  While the pop-up simply returns an energy use figure, it could be configured to return a chart or plot of energy use over time.

• Campus map with energy use

To make the map even more engaging you could consider working in 3D. This example is a 3D urban map for the Swiss city of Winterthur. By opening the layer list you can turn on a map of solar potential – Solarkataster. 

Asset Management

Esri’s mobile apps allow you to collect asset information and feed it back into your definitive database in real-time.  Data collection forms are easy to design and implement. Importantly, they ensure that data is collected consistently by all team members.  By coupling your asset information to an ArcGIS Online map you can quickly get an overview of the condition of your assets across your estate, or automatically flag when important annual inspections are required. This should make your team more efficient, while providing a simple and intuitive map based dashboard of your estate. 

Collecting asset information about trees on campus using Survey123

View map >>

Find out more

To check whether your university already has access to the ArcGIS Platform please use the map below.  If you would like to find out more about how to get started using ArcGIS on your campus, please email highered@esriuk.com