How Purdue University Fort Wayne Eliminated Manual FM Operations Across a 3-Million-Sq-Ft Campus with Facilio

About Purdue University Fort Wayne

Purdue University Fort Wayne (PFW) is a comprehensive public university in Fort Wayne, Indiana, serving students across undergraduate, graduate, and professional programmes as part of the Purdue University system. The university's facilities management division is responsible for maintaining approximately 3 million square feet across 55 buildings, including academic buildings, student housing, parking structures, and outlier properties spanning multiple campus zones — with a team managing reactive and preventive maintenance, grounds, fleet operations, and service requests from thousands of staff and faculty.

Challenges:

By the time Purdue Fort Wayne's facilities team began evaluating a replacement, their CMMS had been in place for over 16 years, and the gap between what it could deliver and what a modern campus required had become impossible to close. Data accumulated without the option to delete or clean it, leaving the system populated with renamed buildings, replaced equipment, and discontinued assets still generating work orders.

Every incoming service request was routed manually by a single administrator, who had to correct the category on the majority of submissions before assigning them. Staff and faculty managed a separate login with a shared generic password, producing a constant flow of IT support calls. Technicians spread across a large, dispersed campus had no mobile access to assignments, and facilities leaders had no dashboards or reporting capability to make the data actionable.

Key Challenges:

• No Single Sign-On — staff and faculty maintained a separate FM system login, driving high volumes of IT support calls and suppressing submission rates across campus
• Manual Dispatch at Every Step — all work orders routed by one person, with the majority requiring manual category correction before assignment
• No Reporting or Analytics — the legacy platform could store data but could not surface it usefully, with no dashboard visibility for facilities leadership
• No Asset Location Data — equipment records carried no room number or space reference, leaving technicians unable to locate assets across a 3-million-sq-ft campus
• No Mobile Access for Field Teams — technicians had no app to receive assignments, update progress, or close work orders in the field
• Stale, Uncleanable Data — years of building renames, equipment replacements, and discontinued assets had accumulated with no deletion option

Facilio's Solution

Purdue University Fort Wayne deployed Facilio's Connected CMMS across its entire campus portfolio, replacing its legacy platform with a modern, configurable FM operating layer. The implementation covered portfolio and asset management, planned and reactive maintenance, an occupant portal for staff and faculty service requests, role-based work order management, and mobile access for field technicians.

Working from a structured requirements process and a clean data migration, the Facilio team brought the full platform live within ten weeks of kickoff — ahead of the university's hard transition deadline.

Solution Highlights

1. Portfolio and Asset Management

Facilio created a structured digital representation of all 55 buildings, modelled down to floor, space, and subspace level. Over 1,100 assets were onboarded with precise location references, so every work order and PM schedule is tied to an exact physical location. Facilities leaders can filter operational data by site, building, floor, or category at any time, using the same hierarchy as the foundation for all reporting.

2. Work Order Management

Facilio's workflow engine replaced the fully manual dispatch process with configurable routing rules that direct requests automatically based on location and category. Each stakeholder group operates within a defined permission tier: requesters submit, supervisors assign and reassign, and technicians see only work assigned to them. Supervisors can redirect across departments directly, without routing back through a central point.

3. Planned Maintenance

Facilio replaced asset-by-asset PM creation with category-level scheduling, so a single PM template now triggers across all assets of the same type. The 400+ planned maintenance schedules were migrated, cleaned, and reconfigured with accurate asset references and correct technician assignments. Automated notifications alert the responsible person ahead of each service, and delegation logic handles reassignment when the primary technician is unavailable.

4. Occupant Portal with SSO

The Facilio occupant portal was integrated with the university's existing identity system, allowing staff and faculty to submit maintenance requests using the same credentials they use daily for email and campus systems. The submission form is configured to PFW's categories and location hierarchy, with photo attachment supported. Requesters receive status updates as their request moves through the workflow, giving them visibility they did not have before.

5. Mobile CMMS

Facilio's mobile app gives PFW's technicians the ability to receive assignments, view asset details and maintenance history, update work order status, attach photos, and close out jobs from the field across the full estate. The app operates within the same role and permission structure as the desktop platform, and for a team spread across multiple campus zones and outlier buildings, it closed the gap between work completion and system record.

6. Reports and Dashboards

Facilio's reporting module gave Purdue Fort Wayne its first real visibility into FM operations as data. Department directors can view asset-level work order history and cost tracking. Facilities leadership can see portfolio-wide KPIs, outstanding volumes, and PM compliance across all 55 buildings. The low-code report builder means the team creates new views and filters themselves, without relying on vendor support.

Impact

• Centralised FM operations for 55 buildings and over 3 million square feet on one platform, giving Purdue Fort Wayne a single source of truth for all maintenance activity across the campus estate
• Single sign-on integration with the university's identity system resolved the top-cited adoption barrier, removing the separate credential overhead that had suppressed request volumes and driven IT support load
• Automated, role-based work order routing replaced a fully manual dispatch process, eliminating the systematic category correction bottleneck that had affected the majority of incoming requests
• Precise site-building-floor-space location hierarchy deployed for 1,100+ assets, enabling accurate technician dispatch across a 3-million-sq-ft campus for the first time
• 400+ planned maintenance schedules migrated, cleaned, and reconfigured with category-level triggers, replacing the previous approach of creating individual PM schedules per asset
• Field technicians across a dispersed campus gained mobile access to assignments, asset data, and work order management, closing the gap between on-site completion and system records