GIS in facilities management: A Case Study of the U-block at the Kenya Polytechnic University College

Abstract

GIS-based Facility Management Systems (FMS) offer several advantages over the traditional analogue mode and/or Computer-Aided Design (CAD)-based systems. For instance, they can integrate a campus location and facility management (building, floor and room location) into one package. The integration simplifies the querying of such data. The Kenya Polytechnic University College’s mode of manual space inventory does not provide for querying the available data for the purpose of quick decision making; neither does it provide for a structured storage system. The objective of this study is therefore to develop, using an existing GIS tool kit, a method of setting up a typical geo-database for organising digital data so as to facilitate information management, its visualization and illustration. In this project, a GIS database for the U-Block of the Kenya Polytechnic University College has been created. As a result of time constraint, it was not possible to have a GIS database for every building of the College. From the U-Block database, one is able to extract information on space, such as the amount space available, the department to which some space is assigned, or even the maximum number of students a room can accommodate (stations) By integrating the different U-Block floor plans, the attribute tables and the room pictures, it is possible to easily manipulate the data and display different views of the rooms, based on usage and assignment to departments. On the basis of this success of the U-Block database, it is recommended that a geodatabase for the entire College be established. Such an intranet-based system should permit the linking of the various building floor plans, facilities data and the general base map layers, which should then be accessed through some standard browser for visualization and reporting of space utilization across the entire College