“We are proud to partner with NHC and drive such a large implementation. This will be one of the largest implementations we lead around the world so we are very excited to kick off the project and streamline NHC’s operations across the entire Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” added Dennis Samson, vice president of operations at Gaea.

In April our CEO Sury Balasubramanian was received by his excellency Eng Mohammed Bin Saleh Albuty, CEO at NHC and sectors vice president in Saudi Arabia to officially launch the project management information system implementation. The meeting started with a presentation to officially launch the product and concluded with a tour.

“We have an active partnership with governmental and non-governmental organizations to make this project successful. We are honored to be part of this large and ambitious project and, as in every implementation, we will put ourselves into it to bring the best software support,” said Sury.

National Housing Company is the investment arm of the Ministry of Municipal, Rural Affairs, and Housing in the residential and commercial real estate sector in Saudi Arabia. The company has become the national enabler of the housing sector and the real estate supply system for the public and private sectors.

NHC is currently developing seven suburbs to provide housing solutions to Saudi citizens and bringing together different agencies and partners, like Gaea, to execute the real estate plan. The plan involves a total of 150,000 units spanning an area of 65,000,000 square meters.

Gaea will be leading the project management system efforts. The system will sync all the applications, information, and resources to have a comprehensive and integral project management platform and it will handle all the aspects of the plan life cycle in every sector of the seven business units (PMOs).

The PMIS implementation includes:

• Oracle Primavera Analytics
• Oracle Primavera Unifier
• Oracle Fusion PPM
• Microsoft Power BI

Learn More

Learn more about Gaea EPPM implementation services, or email us for a custom PMIS evaluation with a Gaea representative.

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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!

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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.

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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.

What’s new in Unifier 16.1 Overview

• FREM enhancements
• Primavera Unifier mobile app for iOS
• Project Controls enhancements
• Primavera Analytics enhancements
• AutoVue 3D support
• Usability enhancements

FREM Enhancements Overview

Space Manager Enhancements

Query-Based Tabs on Space Records

Unifier 16.1 extends support for query-based tabs (QBTs) functionality — currently seen in line item and cost business processes — to Space Manager records. The enhancement enables the creation of QBTs to view, summarize, and report on occupants, equipment, assets, and work orders in a space.

The implementation requires the placement of a space picker on the source business process upper form to link the space record to the business process. A maximum of 8 QBTs are allowed in uDesigner.

Summary elements (Average, Count, Total, Maximum and Minimum) can be placed on the detail form of the space type. Note: Item Logs node is not available for space QBTs.

After a space type with QBTs is deployed from uDesigner, the functionality is available in User mode on the space record of that type. In User mode, use Create, Copy, and Find features in the tab. The enhancement supports custom prints, custom reports, and UDRs (summary elements information).

To access this feature:
In uDesigner, navigate to a space type in Space Manager. Click Query Items to access Query Tabs and Summary Elements.

In User Mode, navigate to Space Manager in a project. Open any space record to display the QBTs, if designed.

Space and Level QBTs on Business Process Records

In Unifier 16.1, line item and cost business processes now support query-based tabs for level and space objects from Space Manager. For example, the Employees business process can have Floors and Spaces QBTs to show their physical location. Similarly, Lease business process can display tabs for a list of floors and spaces to manage their leases.
The method for defining space and level query tabs is the same as for business process query tabs. Labels and names of dialogs have changed to cater to this enhancement. For example, the dialog is now named Select Business Process/Attribute. The label in the Reference BP field is now Reference BP/Attribute.

Space and level QBTs support the definition of summary elements of all type — Average, Count, Total, Maximum and Minimum. They can then be placed in the upper form of parent business processes.

After space and level QBTs are defined, they are automatically available in Item Logs where they can be renamed and have queries defined to filter display of their records at runtime.

Unlike business process QBTs, you cannot create new space or level records within QBTs in User mode. You can copy or edit records displayed in the tabs. In company-level business processes, space/level QBTs have only the Find functionality. New and Copy are not available.

HTML Print, and Custom Print are available to print space and level QBTs. Custom reports and UDRs can be used to report on summary element values.

To access this feature:
In uDesigner, navigate to a line item/cost type business process in Business Processes. Click Query Items to access Query Tabs and Summary Elements. Use Item Logs to rename and define queries in the space/level QBTs.

In User Mode, navigate to a business process log in a project or company workspace, which has the space/level QBTs defined. Open any record to view and use the QBTs and summary elements.

Space Manager Levels UI Changes

In Unifier 16.1, the landing page of a level record has been enhanced. When you open a level record from the levels log, the level details page opens. The first column displays an icon to indicate if a level drawing file has been uploaded. The landing page in earlier Unifier versions displayed the level drawing on the upper section and a mini-log below, which displayed its related spaces. The level drawing did not display optimal quality.

Click Spaces on the details toolbar to view the related spaces of the level record.

Click View on Drawing to open the associated level drawing file. This uses a supported version of DWF viewer / Autodesk Design Review that allows you to view polylines for a space in the space grid. View the drawing file from the Attachments window using AutoVue to comment or mark up. Both are existing functionality.

Note that Spaces and View on Drawing functions are also available on the Levels log toolbar to view related spaces and drawings for a selected level record in the log.

Also note that options that were available in the mini-log and relevant to the drawing file — Bulk Edit, Fill by, and Text by — have been removed.

To view this feature:
In User mode, navigate to the Levels log in Space Manager in a project. View the enhanced log. Also, open any level record to view the details page and its functions.

Preventive Maintenance Enhancements

Pushing changes from PM Book Templates

Push changes from a PM Book template to all or selected PM Books that were created using this template. For example, push changes in frequency of maintenance documented in PM Books or additional maintenance items from PM Book Templates.

Typically, an asset business process (BP) auto-creates a PM Book after picking a PM Book Template. The asset is generated from an Asset Template. In previous versions of Unifier, when changes were made to the PM Book Template (or Asset Template), there was no way to push these changes to the PM Books generated from the PM Book Template (or via the asset BP). Customers had to manually update the records, which potentially led to errors.

Unifier Administration Mode

A new node, Business Process Updates, has been introduced in the Administration Mode Navigator of Company Workspace and shells. This is where updates from PM Book Template can be made to the PM Book records.

The toolbar options of the log allow you to create new update requests from PM Book Template records, cancel a request, or open an existing request.

New set of Administration Mode Access permissions has been introduced for the Business Process Updates Log.

Updates from PM Book Template:

• Impact PM Books generated from that template
• Can be real time or scheduled updates
• Modify all or selected PM Books — use the option to exclude PM Book records from updates.
• Select upper form fields
• Select rows from tabs
• Select fields from tabs
• Add new rows in tabs (Time based tabs only)
• Note: In order to update line items of PM Books, they must reference line items of PM Book Templates.

This capability is not available in project templates.

uDesigner

A new data element, uuu_no_upd (Prevent Business Process Updates?) can be placed in the upper forms of Asset, PM Book and PM Book template. If auto-creation has been defined from an Asset source — a PM Book template to a destination PM Book, then this field value is copied over at runtime.

To access this feature:
Company level PM Book Templates and PM Books: Navigate to Company Workspace tab, Administration Mode. Then, Name.

Project level PM Book Templates and PM Books: Navigate to the project tab, Administration Mode. Then, in the Navigator, select Business Process Updates under Setup.

The post What’s New in the FREM Module of Unifier 16.1? 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

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