SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 25, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Gaea Global Technologies, a leader in systems integration and business process improvement, today announced that it has received a Strategic Contribution award from Oracle’s Construction and Engineering Global Business Unit.

Gaea, an Oracle Platinum Partner, was recognized by Oracle Construction and Engineering for significant and strategic contributions to the global business unit’s success in North America and Latin America. The award also recognized Gaea as a key development partner contributing to the successful release of Oracle’s Primavera Unifier Facilities and Real Estate Management.

Gaea acted as an extension to Oracle’s development team, providing subject matter expertise and technical resources to help Oracle deliver its Primavera Unifier Facilities and Real Estate Management solution. The robust facilities and real estate management solution enables management of an entire real estate portfolio while empowering users to adapt to changing rules and compliance requirements and optimize strategic decision-making.

“For more than ten years, the Oracle and Gaea alliance has delivered successful solutions for Oracle customers,” said Mike Sicilia, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Oracle Construction and Engineering. “This is the latest example of our joint commitment to making IT more responsive, agile and valuable to project-driven and capital-intensive industries.”

“It is an honor to receive this award recognizing Gaea’s deep domain expertise and excellence in delivering leading edge Oracle solutions to the marketplace,” said Sury Balasubramanian, Gaea’s Co-Founder. “We strongly believe that Gaea’s strategic alliance with Oracle will continue to produce high return on investment on Oracle’s products to our customers. The award also is a testimonial to our strength in delivering successful implementations and the ability to be trusted advisors to our enterprise customers who will continue to successfully adopt the latest Oracle’s Construction and Engineering solutions.”

For more information about Gaea’s award, visit http://gaeaglobal.com/oracle-award-2017.

About Gaea

Gaea Global Technologies, Inc. (Gaea) is an award-winning Oracle Platinum Partner and Oracle development partner, specializing in supply chain management and project portfolio management solutions. Our business process and information technology experts provide innovative and cost-effective solutions that improve operations of some of the largest and most complex firms in the world. Gaea’s high-value services and omni-channel capabilities deliver managed risks, actionable insights, agility, scalability and profitability. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Gaea has offices in Chennai and Bangalore India, to support its global clientele. Learn more about Gaea at gaeaglobal.com.

About Oracle

Oracle offers a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of Cloud applications and platform services. For more information about Oracle, visit www.oracle.com.

About Oracle Construction and Engineering

Oracle Construction and Engineering helps companies reimagine their businesses. With best-in-class project management solutions, organizations can proactively manage projects, gain complete visibility, improve collaboration, and manage change. Our cloud-based solutions for global project planning and execution can help improve strategy execution, operations, and financial performance. For more information, please visit www.oracle.com/construction-and-engineering.

Trademarks

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

About Oracle’s Primavera Unifier Facilities and Real Estate Management

Oracle’s Primavera Unifier Facilities and Real Estate Management is a cloud-based as well as on-premise powerful and easy to use solution for managing properties and facilities. It provides automation and flexibility to handle customer-specific facilities management needs, including service requests, preventive and corrective maintenance, inventory, inspections, facility condition assessments, and space management. Like other Primavera Unifier solutions for capital projects, Primavera Unifier Facilities and Real Estate Management provides task reminders, notifications, document management and visualization, messaging, and actionable reporting.

Contact:
Gaea Global Technologies, Inc.
sales@gaeaglobal.com
844 987 4232

The post Gaea Global Technologies Wins Strategic Contribution Award from Oracle appeared first on Gaea.

Collaborate is the annual Oracle user group conference. This year, Gaea was the only Oracle partner recognized by the Oracle Construction and Engineering Global Business Unit (CEGBU) for our significant and strategic contribution to Oracle successes in North America and Latin America!

Gaea was also recognized for being a key Oracle development partner. Gaea was the only Oracle partner to contribute to a successful release of Oracle Primavera Unifier Facilities and Real Estate Management (FREM).

“For more than ten years, the Oracle and Gaea alliance has delivered successful solutions for Oracle customers. This solution is the latest example of our joint commitment to making IT more responsive, agile, and valuable to project-driven and capital-intensive industries.”
– Mike Sicilia, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Oracle Construction and Engineering

Gaea team members Vaibhav, Gokul, and Santosh were on hand at Collaborate17 to receive the award from Mark Webster, Executive Vice President, Oracle Construction and Engineering Global Business Unit.

Gaea would like to thank Oracle, our clients, and our partners around the globe. And a big thank you to the entire Gaea team for your continued effort toward achieving success!

The post Gaea Recognized by Oracle Construction and Engineering Global Business Unit (CEGBU) appeared first on Gaea.

Many organizations are using paper processes, spreadsheets, or nothing at all to manage their facilities, which creates a lack of efficiency and visibility across an organization. Manual paper processes may help keep track of when assets were put into service, but they are severely lacking when it comes to reviewing warranties, maintenance schedule dates, and other important milestones. A facilities management solution can reduce risk by capturing all of the important information in one place, making it a breeze to solve all of these challenges. Many FM solutions even provide a system of user alerts to call attention to, for example, asset maintenance schedules so that equipment can be serviced before it falls below a certain performance level.

Managing facilities in this way often creates errors in data which lead to equipment failure and breakdown. Assets that are out of service, in turn, lead to lost revenue and increased costs, a nasty double whammy. And the survey results back up these error-prone findings, with more than a third of respondents citing “accurate record keeping” as their biggest challenge.

Educational facilities fared the best, with about a third or respondents citing use of a facilities management solution. Offices, on the other hand, fared the worst, with a mere 6% of respondents noting that they used a facilities management solution.

The post How are Companies Managing Facilities? appeared first on Gaea.

Welcome to part 4 of our facilities and real estate management (FREM) series. In part 1, we introduced the top 6 challenges faced by facility managers, and in part 2 and part 3, we discussed the details of the first four challenges. You can review parts 1, 2, and 3 by clicking the links above.

Here in part 4 we’ll look at the last two of the top six challenges: facility condition assessment, and controlling cost.

Facility Condition Assessment

When assessing facility condition, facility managers must consider many questions, including:

• How much capital is needed to remediate a particular facility / building / asset?
• At what point do we need to seriously consider keeping or disposing of a building?
• Is our environment one that is inviting to employees, students, and/or the public?
• How do we manage our entire portfolio over the next 10 years? 20 years? 30 years?
• Are there pragmatic opportunities to leverage bulk purchases? And will those bulk purchases still be useful in the long run?
• Where should the condition of each facility / building / asset be so we can be sure that we are budgeting / investing the proper amount?
• How can we best invest capital to meet organizational needs?

To answer these questions, a periodic assessment of a facility’s condition is an absolute must. Facility managers are required to maintain a facility condition index (FCI) for each facility.

Mathematically, the FCI is represented as:

Managing and tracking all of the historic FCI data is another challenge faced by facility managers. FREM solutions exist that can help solve this challenge by maintaining and analyzing all of the FCI data.

Controlling Cost

Every organization examines operating and maintenance (O&M) expenses and analyzes ways to reduce cost, increase efficiency, reduce risk, and optimize resources. Finding ways to improve the infrastructure with a reduced budget can be very challenging for any facility manager.

To help keep costs in check, regular monitoring of the maintenance budget is one the most critical activities to perform. Getting quick and easy access to cost reports can be a major challenge for facility managers. In every organization, this data often resides in so many different tools or systems that generating the reports becomes a very time consuming and difficult task for the facility manager.

Fortunately, software solutions exist to help manage the monitoring and reporting processes. Choosing one that is part of an enterprise-wide, end-to-end solution can help facility managers improve accuracy and efficiency, monitoring, and reporting, and subsequently, reduce cost.

The post Top 6 Common Challenges in Facilities Management, Part 4 appeared first on Gaea.

Welcome to part 3 of our facility and real estate management (FREM) series. In part 1, we introduced the top 6 challenges faced by facility managers, and in part 2, we discussed the details of the first two challenges, ensuring that the facility is always functionally operational and safe, and energy efficiency management. You can review parts 1 and 2 by clicking the links above.

Here in part 3 we’ll look at the next two challenges: compliance standards management and maintaining aging assets and infrastructure.

Compliance Standards Management

Staying current with all of the regulatory and compliance standards is another tough challenge faced by facility managers. Safety and quality issues exist that could potentially violate federal, state, or city laws and regulations, putting buildings and occupants at serious risk. Facility managers need to proactively coordinate, manage, and monitor internal and external risks associated with facility regulatory compliance. Such a compliance program is needed to stay one step ahead of the ever-changing, stringent regulatory codes and regulations, and to protect an organization from calamities, fines, and penalties.

One way to accomplish the task of maintaining compliance standards is to utilize many of the free resources widely available on the internet, for example, by reading leading industry blogs. Likewise, it is important to allocate time (and budget) to explore continuing education, which may include attending industry workshops and seminars, or even working toward online or offline certifications.

Maintaining aging assets and Infrastructure

Another big challenge faced by facility managers is dealing with aging assets, equipment, and infrastructure. Over time, assets and buildings age and despite our best efforts, naturally begin to wear out. Eventually, the aging process begins to affect facility operations. Of course, preventative maintenance goes a long way toward counteracting the deterioration associated with aging infrastructure, but inevitably, assets from furnaces in the basement to HVAC units on the roof (and the roof itself for that matter!) will need to be repaired and/or replaced.

Proper inspections, warranty tracking, deficiency management, analyzing replacement costs of the equipment, budgeting, and planning for these inevitabilities helps to soften the blow, maintain safe working conditions, and ultimately keep them from draining corporate revenue.

Continue on to part 4.

The post Top 6 Common Challenges in Facilities Management, Part 3 appeared first on Gaea.

Welcome to part 2 of our facilities and real estate management (FREM) series. In part 1, we introduced the top 6 challenges faced by facility managers. If you missed part 1 and would like to read it, or if you have read it but would like to refresh your memory before proceeding, you can find it here.

In the following installments, we’ll dive deeper into all of the challenges and examine ways to solve them. In part 2, we’ll look at the first two challenges: ensuring that the facility is always functionally operational and safe, and energy efficiency management.

 

Ensuring that the facility is always functionally operational and safe

Tracking all of the issues that arise in a facility is one of the biggest challenges faced by facility managers. Prioritizing and analyzing critical vs trivial issues, and then defining a resolution for smooth operation of the facility, can be very time consuming and may result in work delay or stoppage, thereby increasing operating cost.

Organizations look to their facility managers to ensure their properties like office buildings, linear structures, lands, and operating facilities (plants, factories, etc.) remain competitive with other organizations in the same industry. Therefore, one the of most important tasks for the facility managers is to ensure that the facility is always operational and safe.

One way that facility managers solve this challenge is by scheduling regular preventive maintenance. Preventive maintenance is one of the most common procedures performed on a facility’s equipment or assets in order to keep facility managers ahead of a potential disaster instead of behind it. The primary goal of preventive maintenance is to mitigate or avoid the consequences of asset failure by following timely, planned guidelines to prevent equipment and machinery breakdown.

Every asset in a facility has a defined set of services to be performed at a specific time to ensure the smooth operation of the asset. These minor and major checks can significantly extend the lifespan of an asset. Other considerations like weather and seasonal dates are taken into account. For instance, in the case of HVAC systems, maintenance is often performed before the hottest time of the year so that facility occupants aren’t stuck in uncomfortable heat as a result of an unexpected breakdown.

Corrective maintenance is another common task performed in facilities, commonly thought of as a set of tasks performed to identify, isolate, and rectify a fault so that the failed asset can be restored to operational condition. A French official norm defines corrective maintenance as maintenance carried out after failure detection and is aimed at restoring an asset to a condition in which it can perform its intended function.

In other words, corrective maintenance means (to partially borrow an age-old idiom that originally used questionable grammar) if it’s broken, fix it!

Labor and material availability plays a vital role in the success of both corrective and preventive maintenance. If any of the required labor or material is unavailable when needed, the operation of the facility is affected, and therefore, so is its operating cost. Proper tracking of labor and material inventory plays a significant role in the smooth operation and maintenance of a facility.

Energy Efficiency Management

For any organization, buildings are the greatest consumer of energy and subsequently, they generate the greatest impact on the global climate. In today’s world, energy efficiency management of existing buildings is the single biggest action every organization wants to take in order to be more sustainable.

Facility managers look for an enterprise approach to energy and sustainability management that can help them gain control over the use of energy, water, gas, and other resources. Understanding the organization’s energy, carbon, and gas inventory is essential to reducing energy usage and cost. It’s also vital for reducing a facility’s carbon footprint and preparing for compliance with future regulations.

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is changing the way we think about how facilities and communities are planned, constructed, operated, and maintained. LEED has become the most globally used third-party verification for green buildings, with around 1.85 million square feet being certified around the world every day.

LEED certification is important for all buildings during all phases of development. Projects pursuing LEED certification earn points in several sustainability areas. Based on the number of points accumulated, a facility earns one of the four LEED rating levels: certified, silver, gold, or platinum.

Efficiency is the name of the game for LEED-certified buildings. They consume less water and less energy, and as a result they produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions. As an added bonus, the efficiency of a LEED-certified facility saves the owner money.

Most organizations are on the path of achieving and maintaining LEED certification, and facility managers are tasked with ensuring their facilities are maintaining LEED status. Fortunately, there are enterprise solutions that help facility managers monitor, capture, and analyze data to improve sustainability and energy efficiency.

In part 3, we’ll discuss the next two challenges, compliance standards management and maintaining aging assets and infrastructure.

The post Top 6 Common Challenges in Facilities Management, Part 2 appeared first on Gaea.

Facility management professionals face multiple issues during their daily tasks. Issues can run the complexity gamut, from very simple to very difficult. In addition, issues can arise unexpectedly (e.g., a brand new furnace comes apart after three days of use), or they can be the result of a prolonged negligence of precautionary measures that may have been put off for too long for a variety of reasons (e.g., key staff illnesses, unexpectedly busy, etc).

One of the biggest factors an organization must take into account in facilities maintenance is facility similarity. Even though two facilities may be serving a similar, or even exactly the same, purpose (e.g., widget manufacturing), the facilities themselves are never exactly the same. When dealing managing similarly-tasked buildings, each facility is still a unique facilities management experience due to several factors, including location, staffing, size, and facility age.

The top 6 common challenges in facilities management are:

• Ensuring that the facility is always functionally operational and safe
• Energy efficiency management
• Compliance standards management
• Maintaining aging assets and infrastructure
• Facility condition assessment
• Controlling cost

In this ongoing facilities management series, we will examine the biggest problems that facility management professionals face. Please note, these are common problems faced by this industry and each of these problem presents an opportunity to find a solution, and that’s where our passion lies: finding and building solutions!

Continue on to Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

The post Top 6 Common Challenges in Facilities Management appeared first on Gaea.