The University of Canberra Case Study

The University of Canberra promotes itself as being in the top ten universities in Australia, number one in the ACT for graduate employment, and in the top twenty young universities in the world. These are remarkable achievements for a university that celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2022, credited to encompassing progressive teaching and learning, as well as strong ties to industry. Boasting a resident population of kangaroos, the main campus at Bruce in Canberra is unique in many ways.

The Campus Estate team has the broad mission to deliver sustainable property and related solutions to enable the success of the UC community and to get the campus working at its best. Encompassing planning & development, project delivery, operational services, and security & transport, a project to scan the archives commenced in 2016.

With SharePoint being freely available to universities, and on the cloud, the information was catalogued in SharePoint and a Building directory was constructed to store more than 20,000 documents associated with the facilities of the university.

It was determined that drawings were taking too long to find in SharePoint, resulting in time loss and uncertainty around duplicates. Additionally, the drawing handover process was resulting in missing documents that weren’t received from contractors.

The problem faced by the University of Canberra is common to the Property Services and Facilities Management area of universities. Managing documentation, including 3D and BIM (Building Information Models), required an innovative approach to replace the current system, integrate with critical systems such as the GIS, and combine access for internal users and external contractors.

Several initiatives were undertaken to identify issues and develop the requirements of a new system with the engagement of stakeholders:

• Identifying and defining the issues through a series of workshops.

• Preparing the business case and seeking funding.

• Formulating the statement of requirements, to ensure requirements were captured from various perspectives (regular users, irregular users, consultants/ contractors etc), how they will use the system and for what purpose.

• The procurement and evaluation process.

• Considering feel and appearance to ensure a user-friendly adoption.

• Understanding the quantity and quality of the existing drawings.
  

• Determining the tagging and identification of drawings in relation to assets.

Advanced Features and Future Integrations

The Portfolios feature of Lunr provides overall building information, such as location, background, history, occupants, GFA/UFA numbers, and provides a valuable insight for anyone new to the University estate.

Viewing platforms are embedded within the system, allowing everyday users to view CAD files via autogenerated PDF, and without requiring additional software, such as DWG TrueView, or requesting assistance to open and print documents. Viewing tools also allow for red-line markup, as well as viewing Revit and IFC files.

Advanced searching includes the ability to undertake a spatial search using GIS data from Esri. This is particularly useful for finding drawings for the university’s most complicated buildings (Building 1) and utilities.

The ability to integrate with the GIS is showing the way forward, and potential integrations with other tools such as Archibus, and the CMMS (Computerised Maintenance Management System) represent the next steps.