Hi Erika,

This is an excellent question.  I often questioned the need for building more buildings by asking "do we even know if we are using the space we have already built efficiently?!"  It is very difficult to know without some kind of system that manages, tracks and analyzes the manner in which facilities are being utilized.

It's important to note that space utilization on campuses is highly politicized, so making efficient use of space is not simply a matter of implementing a space management system.  The use of such a system has to have buy-in from the top such that           participation in it is not optional and so that the inefficiencies and potential savings it identifies will be given full consideration alongside often-valid political concerns.

If the University of North Texas is serious about investing in a space management system it will be well served running it through a Request For Proprosals (RFP) process.  There are certainly many classroom/facility scheduling systems out there and an RFP will give you the opportunity to define the performance metrics that are most valuable to you (I wouldn't doubt that GHG emissions reductions would be a novel metric for most of these companies) and then have companies compete to demonstrate that their product meets those criteria at the least cost.  Don't be surprised if an RFP produces price quotes 20 to 30% below what you are quoted when you inquire about a company's software pricing outside of a competitive RFP process.

Hopefully others can provide you some info about the systems their campuses use, but in the meantime you should be able to build a pretty good list of companies/products to include in your research/RFP by taking a look at directory listings like this one put together by the Open Directory Project.   You can then build on that list by taking the most promising products listed there and using them in google searches to find their top competitors - which will also likely be promising candidates. 

If you haven't ever conducted an RFP, there are a lot of best practices that your procurement or IT department might be able to help you with.  RFPs are fairly intensive processes if run well and *very* intensive and exhausting processes if run poorly.

While a software systems seems like a good investment when scheduling classes, I would might recommend that people who are thinking about space utilization on their campuses start first with old fashioned pencil, paper and clipboard.  Here are a couple amusing stories from my time at Duke:

When the EH&S department intiated a program to get a better control on dangerous chemicals in Duke's research labs, they discovered many laboratory store rooms that were stocked to the brim with aging jugs of chemicals that had barely been used or never been opened.  The current occupants of the labs often had no idea that the chemicals were there or what they were for because they had been ordered by a previous occupant of the lab that had long since moved on.  Through the inventory processs, many labs ended up getting valuable space back in their store rooms as redundant and expired chemicals were removed!  That storeroom shelf space would have sat poorly utilized for years and years if it weren't for the EH&S program - the goal of which had nothing to do with making the storerooms of Duke's labs more efficient.

By far, the highest return on investment can be achieved when freeing up space that your institution is leasing - because then it can stop leasing it and immediately achieve a savings.  If you want to save money and help your school make more efficient use of space, talk to the office on your campus that is in chargeof leasing space to learn about what kind of space the school is leasing.  Ask them what space is the most expensive, why various spaces are being leased (often political), what are the needs for new space they foresee (and try to head these off by finding ways to more efficiently use current space), and if they have any ideas how space can be better utilized.

A sharp staffer at Duke decided to investigate the fact that Duke was leasing tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of sqft of off-site storage space.  What they found on touring the warehouses was that the furniture and equipment being stored there was often ancient, poorly inventoried (so finding, retrieving, selling or otherwise redistributing items was difficult) and generally going nowhere.  Items were literally sitting in these warehouses for decades with their previous owners having forgotten about them long ago - if they hadn't moved on from the university entirely.  In fact, when the owners of dozens of items in the warehouses were tracked down in order to inquire about their plans for the items, they often were unaware the items were still there or that their department was still being billed for the items storage!  They had assumed the items would have been resold through Duke's surplus store.  The owners almost always said "get rid of it!"  In fact, the warehouses had built up in large part as a result of Duke's surplus program being oriented toward reselling unwanted equipment, but the rate of sales perpetually lagged the supply of new surplus equipment.

After the analysis of this situation reached higher-ups, the "surplus" program at Duke was completely revised.  Warehouses were cleaned out through donation programs and firesales, ultimately saving Duke hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in warehouse leasing costs alone.  And, to ensure that the situation never redeveloped as it had before, the university decided to end its surplus retail operation and build long-term channels for efficiently donating unwanted items.  The potential revenue lost by switching to donations was far less than the cost of operating a retail outlet and leasing storage space for items waiting for resale.

Hi Erika,

Do you have a University architect or staffer who has floor plans of the buildings? We have done a massive in-house space utilization study using only our AutoCad program and floor plans with Excel. Each space is coded according to the NCES codes, published in a manual called "Postsecondary Education Facilities Inventory and Classification Manual (FICM)". Using the codes, you can differentiate between general classroom space and lab space, for example. Input the codes with the square footages and capacity into an Excel spreadsheet, and use a pivot table to filter and analyze the data.

I think we would have paid a consulting firm thousands of dollars to do this inventory, but by just using a few in-house resources we were able to do it ourselves. Start with your Facilities department, asking what resources they have and go from there.

Good luck! And I can say that the space inventory has been incredibly helpful in other areas as well, things we did not necessarily foresee when embarking on the project.

Megan Stephens