Ecifm for higher education
  • Matches grant funding to specific facilities and spaces
  • Tracks grant funding by Principal Investigator to improve internal billing
  • Aids in Indirect Cost Recovery (ICR) to ensure all research-related O&M costs are covered

For most college and university systems, spending on facilities is second only to spending on staff salaries. Higher education systems are comprised of multiple facilities—classrooms, departmental offices, dormitories, cafeterias, sports complexes, physical plants, churches and more—with different operations and maintenance (O&M) requirements for each, making budgeting for their upkeep a challenge.

Higher education systems also deal with enrollment levels that rise and fall from semester to semester, leading to multiple departments that must expand and contract to accommodate these shifts. Even if your higher education system’s O&M budget is balanced today, that’s no guarantee you’ll be prepared when your requirements change.

Fortunately, there’s software to help manage it all. The IBM TRIRIGA® Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) is designed to help give large organizations a single view of all the people, places, and things under their charge. TRIRIGA consists of six integrated and powerful modules that work together to handle every aspect of portfolio management to help you find ways to reduce waste, cut costs and use your facilities more efficiently.

eCIFM, a premier IBM business partner and certified value-added TRIRIGA resellers, has worked with higher education leaders on a system that works with TRIRIGA to give portfolio managers a high-level view of all facilities, with visibility down to the asset level, to let them make decisions with the aid of accurate and comprehensive data. With the help of eCIFM, you’ll get the best use out of all of your spaces today and can take a strategic approach as to how they’ll be used in years to come. This includes planning for new capital projects to keep you growing.

Asset & Facility Management Software

Every dollar spent unnecessarily is one that could have furthered someone’s education. Our higher education solution helps pinpoint and eliminate those wasted budget dollars throughout your college or university system. You can use eCIFM’s solution for higher education to help you make the best data-driven decisions possible. Our solutions will help you with multiple necessary applications, including the following:

  • Conducting space occupancy surveys and studies
  • Meeting US Office of Management and Budget definitions for direct and indirect costs
  • Tracking the costs of facilities, personnel and spaces specific to the indirect cost rates reported by the university
  • Simplifying and automating the process of gathering data about facility spaces

Exclusive Higher Education-Specific Features

We’ve developed features specifically designed to meet the needs of institutions of higher education, including:

  • The ability to match grant funding to spaces. When grant funding comes in, you’ll know where and how it should be allocated.
  • Tracking of grant funding for Principal Investigators of university-associated grant-based research.
  • Indirect cost recovery—the recovery of all costs, such as grant administration and laboratory operations and maintenance, associated with externally-sponsored research.
Managing sprawling real estate and equipment portfolios is a constant balancing act: It’s vital to leave enough square footage vacant to handle the occasional move or expansion, but not so much that you’re spending money on unused or underused spaces. These decisions are difficult enough to make when managing a single facility; to do so for dozens or potentially hundreds of facilities within your portfolio requires space management software like IBM TRIRIGA—and it requires a company like eCIFM to help you implement TRIRIGA and customize it to suit your higher education institution’s specific needs.

The Best Higher Education Asset & Facility Management Software: Getting Started

Higher education institutions have many complex and unique requirements that are difficult to streamline. eCIFM can solve these problems with software designed to meet the specific requirements of college and university systems. We’ve helped hundreds of companies get up and running on TRIRIGA—we can install it, migrate your existing data into it, train you and your people on it, and create custom solutions to help you and your institution get the best possible use out of it. If you need to make your budget go as far as it can, we should talk.