How Warren Township Schools Leveraged Facility Management Technology for Success in Operational Efficiency

District Profile

Location: Marion County, Indianapolis, IN
Student Enrollment: Serves more than 12,000 students
Campus Footprint: 1 Early Childhood Center (Pre-K), 9 Elementary Schools (grades K-4), 3 Intermediate and Middle Schools (grades 5 – 8), 1 Adult Education, an alternative school (grades 6-12), the Walker Career Center, and 1 High School (grades 9 – 12)

Super User Profile

Name: Joshua Prevost
Title: Electronics Specialist
Tenure: Been with MSD of Warren Township for 11 years

Life Before Follett Facilities Schedules^®

Warren Township used a different software solution prior to Facilities Schedules. They experienced a lot of frustration in terms of customizing the system to their needs. “Any changes we wanted to do, we had to pay them. Including setup and modifications to existing features”, explains Joshua. “Cost-wise, it was very expensive. We were nickeled and dimed and as a result we didn’t do it very often.” Joshua and his team had to conform to the constraints of the system, which led them to start looking for alternative solutions.

Life with Facilities Schedules

There are over 600 groups that use Warren Township’s Facilities Schedules instance and in the district, over 20 approvers and two admins – Joshua is one of them. The biggest difference for Joshua with Facilities Schedules has been the ability to adjust things in the system on their own. This includes things like updating spaces and space information for rental and changing internal approvers. “As we get new principals or administrators, we have a building level approver. So being able to go in and easily change who approves stuff in a particular building or area is really nice in the system,” explains Joshua, “The ability to be able to change permits and change information on groups or events is really nice.” Also nice, Facilities Schedules is both faster and cheaper than their previous solution according to Joshua.

The biggest difference – being able to adjust things on their own!

Joshua Prevost
Electronics Specialist

Cool Use Case

Facilities Schedules and Building Automation

Check out how Josh uses Facilities Schedules in conjunction with some of their remote locking  automation system. “Almost every exterior door in the township has a key reader on it. People can’t just unlock exterior doors anymore and most don’t get exterior keys because re-keying exteriors gets really expensive. I spend a lot of time programming doors unlocking for events. So if there’s an event in the performing arts center, a facility use request gets entered into Facilities Schedules, including what time they want the door unlocked. I go into the event details and schedule when the door will be unlocked. The doors will unlock at that time for the group requesting the space and lock at the end of the event. It’s easy to manage this through the custom fields we created in ML Schedules to include on event requests.”