The Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust suffered a hard drive failure in the Raid array of their 10 year old UNIX hardware which took their UNIX WIMS system down. Within a matter of days Asckey Data Services Ltd was able to provide a hosted Eclipse-fm® system as a replacement, including key FM operational data.
The Ipswich NHS Trust is one of the largest general hospitals in East Anglia and provides healthcare services to nearly half a million people. The Estates Management Helpdesk has 12 core FM department staff users managing the allocation and execution of both ad-hoc and Planned Preventive Maintenance tasks, with another 12 more general staff occasionally accessing the system for information. They handle from 60 to 100 helpdesk calls per day and adding in the planned maintenance tasks the system is handling nearly 700 tasks per week. A separate department handles all the specialist Electro-Biomedical Engineering (EBME) equipment repairs using an in-house developed system based on Microsoft SQL Server with a Delphi based application front end.
Early in 2009 their previous FM system, WIMS, became inoperable due to hardware problems precipitating an urgent switch to Eclipse-fm®, a move that had already been agreed in principle.
Temporary N3 Hosting - the fast track to reinstating the service
With the system completely down, replacement became a priority. Asckey Data Services Ltd, who develop and support Eclipse-fm® for the Healthcare Facilities Consortium, set up a remote hosted Eclipse-fm® service within a day or two at their premises, via the NHS N3 private and secure network. (Asckey are the only FM software supplier with N3 Hosting accreditation).
Existing data
Conversion of the UNIX derived WIMS data to the new Eclipse-fm® Microsoft SQL Server based database was rendered much easier through the hosted set-up with both Asckey and the Trust FM staff being able to see and work on the conversion together, via the N3 link.
Vital data – Assets, Task Templates and the Planned Preventive Maintenance (PPM) schedules - was all transferred into Eclipse-fm® complete with the essential location details and Management Structure into which the assets fit. This was a key factor in the ease with which Eclipse-fm® came into use.
Vic Ball, Estates Manager, comments
“Asckey was able to bring everything we needed from the old WIMS system into Eclipse-fm® This gave us an immediately functioning new system. Creating all our task definitions and PPM schedule from scratch would have been an impossibility given the necessarily short time scale precipitated by the sudden unavailability of the old system”.
Eclipse-fm® Helpdesk proved straightforward to operate
Once up and running, and with the data transferred, the Eclipse-fm® Helpdesk as the crucial tool in day to day Estates Management went into use with no time for the usual niceties of training. Vic Ball says
"Yes, the staff found it different, but our staff members have been very open to the changes involved, and Eclipse-fm® turned out to be easy enough to learn from scratch with very little outside assistance".
Concerns as to performance of Eclipse-fm® as a Windows system compared with the character mode Unix WIMS also rapidly disappeared. Vic says
“No problems. We just didn’t notice any speed of access issues while hosted at Asckey, nor do we have any now that we have the system back in house”
18 Months On
Vic Ball has been very pleased with how things have gone. The abrupt changeover to the new system gave rise to far fewer problems than might have been expected and while later on more extensive training was taken up, the relatively long period of successful “self taught usage” is a tribute to both the ease of use of Eclipse-fm® and the resourcefulness of The Ipswich NHS Trust FM staff. 
Vic has also begun to extend the visibility of the system via the use of Web Eclipse. This web interface can be accessed either via www/NHS N3 or the trust’s own intranet and permits all Trust staff to report on and view progress of tasks. This should ease the early morning pressure on help desk staff logging new overnight tasks.
Ian Golding, Electrical Engineer, is very happy with Eclipse-fm®.
“I really like the way the Eclipse-fm® screens work. Eclipse-fm® gives me much more control in allocating tasks to the best person taking into account workload, experience and in some cases, qualifications. Also it is much easier to trace jobs when necessary and I particularly like the extensive searching features that Eclipse-fm® provides; these let me find any task detail even from only a vague memory of what it was.”
Future Plans
EBME Management
Amalgamation of the currently separate EBME maintenance system into Eclipse-fm® is a major priority for the Ipswich NHS Trust. Vic Ball and Phil Harman (EBME Manager) are both very active in the specialist “EBME Feedback group” that Asckey has established. Vic says
“We don’t think there is any one system that handles the special needs of EBME within the context of an overall FM and Asset Management system, and with the growing emphasis on “joined up management” this is a real need. This is a major plus to Eclipse-fm®".
Web and Mobile Devices
Extending the visibility of some of the system via “any time, any place” Mobile Task Management is also something Vic Ball would like to move towards, as this has the potential to reduce “travelling time” around the Trust site.
Overall
The Ipswich NHS Trust FM staff found themselves in a situation where they had to move from a typical 1980s character mode FM system to a full Windows GUI based one. The move went smoothly in these less than favourable circumstances and contrary to what might have been feared, the physical responsiveness of the new Windows based system has been more than adequate.
A printable (PDF) version of this is available here.
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