FACILITIES MANAGEMENT WHITE PAPERS

Top natural gas producer Chesapeake Energy automates business processes with IWMS for its 3M sq. ft. portfolio

Chesapeake Energy Corporation is the second largest independent producer of natural gas in the U.S. It is also the most active driller of new wells in the U.S., and one of the leading consolidators of onshore U.S. natural gas assets.

Headquartered in Oklahoma City, the company's operations are focused on exploratory and developmental drilling, and corporate and property acquisitions in the Mid-Continent, Permian Basin, South Texas, Texas Gulf Coast, Barnett Shale, Ark-La-Tex and Appalachian Basin regions of the United States.

All that activity has produced an explosion in the number of Chesapeake's facilities and employees. But these changes came without an accompanying improvement in the information systems to track them, until Chesapeake tapped a rich field of data management with ARCHIBUS.

From Manual to Automated Processes

Chesapeake currently has over 6,500 workers and is adding 75 employees a month to the 3 million square feet of space that they directly manage, which includes a 100-acre main campus and 140 field offices in 13 states. Another million feet is leased out through a management firm. The fast growth presented a challenge in managing those facilities and personnel, records for which were largely paper-based and archived in file cabinets. Other facilities information was captured in Excel spreadsheets or contained in aerial drawings with Post-It Notes identifying key properties.

"One of our senior vice presidents finally got so frustrated at not being able to get his hands on property, facilities and lease management information," remembers Chesapeake Manager of Facilities and Construction, Jeff Weides, "that it resulted in a mandate to get a 21st century IT solution."

That solution finally came in the form of a centralized, integrated system with the implementation of Web Central along with a suite of key applications that included Real Property & Lease Management, Space Management, Building Operations Management, and Fleet Management.

"The most immediate change was seen in the efficiencies that came in work order management, where information on work orders is now being exchanged with staff wirelessly and with contractors over Blackberries," says Weides. "This has let us spread work orders out more evenly and track how long it takes to close them.

"But once we realized that ARCHIBUS could do much more than that, our VP brought in the Real Property & Lease Management application to handle a growing inventory of buildings."

Reports, Moves, With A Keystroke

All property and lease information, which had required manual updates and extensive searches of paper records for reporting purposes, now resides in the ARCHIBUS application. Reports on locations, property numbers, previous owners, sales price, pending sales and other information can now be accessed easily with a few keystrokes by executives who rely on ARCHIBUS self-service capabilities.

Equally major improvements in managing all those properties, and the information on the increasing number of people in them, are being produced with the implementation of the ARCHIBUS Space Management application.

Space Management has allowed the company, for the first time, to capture square footage, room details, and occupancy and occupant information in one central database. The constant in-flow and re-location of people within the company has also been made easier by the Web-based Move Management application that allows individuals to request their own moves.

"Now only one person is needed to oversee the move function at Chesapeake," Weides points out. "He figures out where they are going, verifies the move approval, prints labels for the moving boxes, and handles all the other move details with ARCHIBUS."

And with the new Fleet Management application, the company is better able to monitor and report on personal and corporate use patterns, maintenance records, fuel costs and other information formatted for the accounting and finance departments. That data can now be reported over the Web from Chesapeake's campus locations and many field offices throughout the Midwest and Appalachia and seamlessly transferred into the central ARCHIBUS database.

Savings of $4,000,000

The result of the ARCHIBUS implementation has been up-to-date campus maps, current employee information, efficient on-demand maintenance work, seamless preventive maintenance processes, accurate lease and accounting information and much more.

Still more applications will be coming online in the near future, says Weides, who sees a continuing need for centralized, accessible business intelligence to manage Chesapeake's growing needs.

High on the company's wish list is the ARCHIBUS Emergency Preparedness application to document facility and materials information as well as safety procedures to protect life and property. Currently, for example, facility drawings are manually maintained without adhering to common standards, making accurate views of the company's campus properties unavailable to first-responders and others.

In the meantime, Chesapeake will be reaping the benefits of its established ARCHIBUS applications. After savings of $1,500,000 following its initial ARCHIBUS implementation, the company projects additional savings of $2,500.000 over a five-year period from its various process improvement and data centralization/access strategies.

"Those applications get substantial use in tracking where people and vacancies are and support the intelligent allocation and management of space," confirms Weides. "Our management is especially happy because getting real estate and facilities information used to take days and now it just takes minutes."

For other business process re-engineering case studies, please visit:

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. Case Study
Unum Insurance Company Case Study
Monte dei Paschi di Siena Banking Group Case Study

About ARCHIBUS

ARCHIBUS is a leading global provider of real estate, infrastructure and facilities management software, with expenditures for ARCHIBUS-related products and services exceeding $1.7 Billion (USD). With ARCHIBUS, organizations of all sizes and their outsourcing partners can use a single, comprehensive, integrated solution to make informed strategic decisions that optimize return-on-investment, lower asset lifecycle costs, and increase enterprise-wide productivity and profitability.

More than 4,000,000 ARCHIBUS users collectively manage over 5,000,000 properties, with organizations reporting facilities-related cost savings as high as 34%. With over 1,600 ARCHIBUS Business Partners, local and regional support worldwide is available in over 130 countries and in over two dozen languages. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, ARCHIBUS, Inc. has pioneered real estate, infrastructure and facilities management software technologies since 1982—when it developed one of the world's first integrated CAFM (computer-aided facilities management) systems. For more information, visit www.archibus.com.