Team Information

Patricia McNally-Leef, Project Manager
Juergen Friese
Don Seeley
Matthew Brents
Stephen Whiteley
Alan Brown
Eric Denklau
Jon Keiser
Cynthia London
Brent Baker
University of Colorado Boulder.

Description

The scope and scale of CU Boulder's award-winning Campus Dining Services (CDS) is impressive.  Students, staff, faculty, and visitors have over 15 locations or venues from which to choose, ranging from in-house dining options to retail meals-on-the-go. Dining operations run seven days a week year round and over 5,000 pieces of equipment - stoves, ovens, warming trays, dish machines, and more - are in regular use.  This creates a unique maintenance challenge for the Dining Mechanics who service and repair the equipment, not to mention the maintenance that is required on vent hoods, exhaust, and air circulation systems.
 
The Dining Equipment Maintenance Master Plan provides a rolling, multi-year dining equipment maintenance/repair/replacement plan, and a dedicated schedule for maintaining related building mechanical systems.  A cross-functional team from Housing Facilities Services, Campus Dining Services, and Financial Services collaborated on this unique and proprietary solution, using the sound principles of Project Management, Lean, and Six Sigma methodologies.  A comprehensive matrix/Gantt Chart identifies when certain dining locations and venues will be closed, the duration of the closure, the revenue impact of the closure, the preventive maintenance that is scheduled to be done, which dining locations and venues are open, and how many meals they can accommodate.

How does this benefit the University?

Over 3 million meal swipe transactions occur each year.  This plan benefits the University in these ways:

  • Planned equipment maintenance will reduce the occurrence of breakdown and reactive maintenance;
  • Planned venue closure allows proper maintenance of hood, vent, and exhaust systems, thereby reducing the possibility of system failure;
  • Planned equipment and infrastructure maintenance is less expensive than reactive maintenance, thus reducing overall operating costs;
  • Cost projections/forecast are more easily managed, thereby facilitating planning and execution;
  • Dining operations will experience fewer disruptions in service as a result of equipment breakdown;
  • Major equipment replacement and dining space re-configurations are easily planned;
  • Dining operations gain critical operational resiliency.

Implementation/Future Plans

This is being implemented now.  Planning is occurring for the first iterations of equipment/systems maintenance and repair scheduled to begin in May 2019.  Preliminary planning and scheduling of work will begin in April 2019 for work scheduled to be performed beginning in May 2020.  Planning for subsequent years, according to the DEMMP, will begin approximately 12 months in advance.