What Is Connected Workplace for Higher Education?

The university experience is evolving, and it requires more from your teams and solutions than ever to effectively manage campus operations.

Between extensive networks of academic buildings, student housing, specialized labs, and administrative offices, it’s difficult for administrators to get a centralized grasp on all the critical operations happening across campus.

Connected Workplace solves this challenge by bringing together key operational functions onto one user-friendly platform. It is the only integrated workplace management system (IWMS) built on ServiceNow, ensuring seamless connectivity to other organizational processes.

By reducing the number of software systems your university manages, Connected Workplace streamlines processes and consolidates data to give you better, actionable insights into both the day-to-day and long-term operations of your campus.

Proactive Asset & Maintenance Management

Nuvolo Asset & Maintenance helps you manage and track your facilities and maintenance programs that sustain your campus. Instead of tracking all assets—from HVAC systems in lecture halls to specialized equipment in laboratories— in siloed spreadsheets or applications, teams get a much more comprehensive view into the lifecycle of their equipment. This centralized system captures crucial performance data, moving beyond basic tracking toward predictive maintenance and informed campus planning.

With all information in one place, you can streamline the entire maintenance process from request to resolution, ensuring you’re providing faculty and students with the best on-campus experience possible—helping with recruitment, retention, and safety.

• Requests on the Go: Faculty, staff, or students can submit work order tickets wherever they are. Plus, technicians can access work orders, complete Checklists and Work Rounds, and view Knowledge Base aids (like SOPs and guides) right from the field in a mobile application.
• Intelligent Routing: Eliminate manual assignment with auto-generated work orders. When a ticket is entered, the system instantly routes it to the right technician based on location, skill set, and asset type, accelerating resolution time.
• Proactive Work Management: The system supports various work types, including Preventive Maintenance (scheduled inspections) and Corrective Work for immediate repairs, ensuring operational stability and asset longevity.
• Asset Lifecycle Control: Manage devices, equipment, and parts through the entire lifecycle, from Asset Onboarding & Offboarding through to retirement. Conduct Asset Audits to verify data, identify missing assets, and resolve discrepancies efficiently for regulatory compliance and grant reporting.
• Integrated Purchasing & Contracts: Maintenance needs seamlessly drive the purchasing process. Generate Purchase Requisitions for parts, labor, or services needed for a Work Order, which turn into Purchase Orders upon approval.
• Smart Parts & Inventory: Efficiently manage stockrooms with features like Transfer Orders and Parts Receiving & Returns. Set Min/Max Levels for parts, which automatically trigger Purchase Orders or transfers for replenishment.

By moving routine processes from manual tasks to automated workflows, your facilities team is freed from focusing on small, reactive details. This strategic shift allows them to focus on big-picture operational excellence, driving maximum value and creating a consistently superior experience for both your employees and students.

Intelligent Space & Workplace Optimization

For higher education, space is a vital, strategic asset, directly impacting enrollment, research output, and community life. Thoughtfully managed campus spaces are key to providing the ideal environment for students to learn and faculty to conduct groundbreaking work.

Nuvolo Space & Workplace helps you effectively manage academic and administrative space, make areas accessible to the campus community, optimize utilization, and plan for future campus needs, all within one centralized platform. This is essential for managing flexible-use classrooms, shared research facilities, and hybrid models.

• Visual Portfolio Planning: Gain a clear, visual understanding of all spaces, standardize planning processes, and ensure accurate cost tracking and chargebacks to specific departments or grants.
• Flexible Spaces: Create flexible assignments—from dedicated faculty offices to assigning working groups to shared research benches or departmental “neighborhoods”—to support the maximum utilization of specialized areas.
• Seamless Reservations: Provide a frictionless experience by enabling instant, seamless booking of study rooms, collaboration spaces, conference rooms, and specialty labs for the campus community.
• Strategic Capacity Planning: Ensure your campus portfolio aligns with enrollment growth and research goals by visually modeling complex resource allocation using Stacking and Blocking tools, maximizing space efficiency, and defining flexible policies for hybrid teams.
• Predictive Space Forecasting: Move beyond reactive decisions by integrating real-time utilization data (from sensors/WAPs) with enrollment and faculty headcount projections, enabling you to accurately predict future space demand and strategically plan real estate investment or new construction.

Plan for today and tomorrow. By unifying these critical functions, employees will spend less time managing logistics and more time collaborating. Nuvolo simplifies complex organizational changes and provides the definitive data needed for confident, long-term real estate investment and growth planning.

Data-Driven Real Estate & Portfolio Management

Managing campus properties, especially complex lease arrangements or commercial real estate investments, through manual spreadsheets risks missed deadlines and vital data loss. Nuvolo Real Estate & Portfolio transforms this reactive work into a proactive, data-driven strategy.

• Financial Compliance & Risk Mitigation: Ensure automatic compliance with workflows that align with complex accounting standards like IFRS 16 / FASB ASC 842.
• Proactive Lease & Property Administration: Avoid surprises with automated reminders for critical dates, renewals, and lease options. Plus, you can easily classify and manage all details of your complex contracts, including lease clauses and amendments, ensuring timely decision-making and optimal contract execution.
• Strategic Transaction Management: Drive portfolio performance by tracking and executing all transactions—from discovery to closing—in one place.
• Forward-Looking Portfolio Optimization: Make proactive, data-driven real estate decisions with detailed portfolio performance data and intelligent forecasting tools.

By tracking key portfolio indicators alongside maintenance costs and space usage data in one place, you can visualize how your campus is performing, enabling you to strategically manage assets and meet future business objectives.

Get the Most out of Your Capital Investments

Managing the lifecycle of your capital projects—from initial concept and funding through execution and closeout—is complex. Relying on disparate spreadsheets and documents creates delays, increases costs, and makes it impossible to accurately predict the impact of your investments. Nuvolo Capital Planning & Projects transforms this scattered process into a strategic, cohesive, and predictable program.

The platform provides a single source of truth for all project data, from long-range capital forecasts to detailed execution budgets and timelines. By connecting planning to execution, you gain the control and transparency needed to prioritize the right projects, manage risks, and ensure that every capital dollar aligns with your organization’s mission and future growth.

• Strategic Capital Planning & Project Intake: Streamline requests via a self-service catalog, automatically prioritize multi-year plans using live asset data (FCA), and leverage workflows for project baselining, scope definition, and milestone setting.
• Program Management & Financial Control: Enhance resource planning with timecards and align funding accurately. Manage the entire bidding and procurement cycle, and ensure comprehensive oversight using the Portfolio Dashboard for status, budget, and risk.
• Budgeting & Financial Management: Ensure accurate cost estimation during intake. Manage contracts (with NTE/Retainage), streamline purchase orders and invoices, and control budgets and allocations using templates for precise financial oversight.
• Collaboration & Communication: Centralize project information by managing stakeholder details and satisfaction, documenting meeting minutes and status reports for easy distribution, and organizing all project documentation in one location.

Plus, you can report out on bonds to ensure you’re meeting state requirements. Errors in reporting can cost your university millions of dollars, but Nuvolo offers detailed cost reporting to minimize that risk.

When all this critical information resides in the same platform, you can drill down into the details and make more strategic decisions, ensuring that every capital dollar aligns with the institution’s mission and future growth.

Meet Sustainability Goals

With Nuvolo Sustainability & Energy, you can track energy data associated with your portfolio, including the energy usage of your stores. You can evaluate changes and monitor store footprint data, making it easier to prioritize projects such as updating inefficient HVAC systems or installing different lighting.

You can also set thresholds for alerts and look at spikes in usage, helping manage energy costs across multiple locations.

Centralized Vendor Management & Accountability

When relying on third-party contractors for specialized maintenance, food services, janitorial services, or construction, risk mitigation is paramount. Connected Workplace standardizes vendor management by centralizing all data, communications, and work orders, giving you real-time visibility into their performance and ensuring they meet agreed-upon Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

When you have a more collaborative, transparent, and integrated vendor management solution in place, your vendors become trusted partners and collaborators.

Connected Workplace provides a clearer picture into the performance of all of your vendors alongside other key business data, enabling you to make more informed, data-driven decisions.

Protect Assets from Cyber Threats

It’s more important than ever to secure your network-connected, non-IT devices against cyber-attacks.

Increasingly, hackers have been able to obtain access to these kinds of operational technology (OT) devices, causing shutdowns and other issues. OT devices include HVAC systems, cameras, revenue-generating assets, sensors, and other crucial technology.

The Nuvolo OT Security product ensures your connected OT devices are safe, accessible, and protected against risk.

Ready to Connect Your Campus?

When all projects, invoices, contracts, space, work orders, assets, and other critical data reside in the same database, you have unprecedented business intelligence. You can drill down into the details and be confident in your ability to answer tough questions.

Nuvolo is the only complete IWMS solution built on ServiceNow. By connecting all your data in one place, you can optimize the faculty and student experience while gathering key insights that help inform all decisions campus-wide.