Jun 07, 2021
By Kate Camerlin

The American Rescue Plan Act: What Higher Education Institutions Should Know About COVID-Related Safety Improvements

The American Rescue Plan (ARP) is a $1.9 trillion relief package meant to speed economic recovery from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It provides more than $170.3 billion for K-12 schools, higher education, and other related programs.

It is the single largest investment ever made in public education.

The funds are intended to help educators mitigate the effects of COVID-19, and they can be used across a range of items and activities–although there are some restrictions, including requiring that institutions set aside 50% of funding for emergency financial aid grants, among other requirements.

Higher education institutes can use funds from the ARP for purposes such as:

  • Investing in learning technology
  • Making COVID-related safety improvements to campuses and facilities
  • Providing training for faculty and staff
  • Making up for lost revenue due to the pandemic

Nuvolo Connected Workplace is a software platform that helps you manage COVID-related safety improvements across your campus.

 

Using Technology to Rethink Campuses and Make COVID-Related Safety Improvements

Planning and renovating your facilities requires a deep level of coordination between departments.

Why not look for a solution designed to manage space and facilities on the same platform? One that can help make it easier to address coronavirus-related concerns now—while also modernizing your campus services program for the future.

Connected Workplace is a building, space, and facilities management solution designed to connect your campus services teams.

It can help you plan and prioritize your projects in several key ways.

Optimize Space Planning and Redesigns

The Connected Workplace makes implementing campus redesigns easier.

Your static campus, building, and floor maps turn into interactive space and maintenance tools.

Everyone—from visitors, students, and the cleaning crew, to the healthcare services and facilities directors—uses the same virtual floor maps.

With interactive maps, you can redesign your campus, map out hand sanitizing and temperature check stations, determine which common areas will be off-limits, create new single direction walking paths, and more.

You can even create move simulations before the actual move to ensure the process will run smoothly.

Once a redesign or move is in place virtually, the solution will auto-generate and auto-assign work orders. Technicians and maintenance crews use the interactive floor maps on their mobile phones to navigate to and manage those work orders.

On the mobile app, they have all the people, assets, work, and location information they need to get projects done faster.

Make Maintenance and Cleaning Easier

With the Connected Workplace Maintenance solution, your maintenance teams have access to cleaning checklists from the mobile app. They complete the cleaning and sanitizing lists, and you have a time-stamped record of the cleaning procedure.

The checklists are pre-built based on CDC and WHO cleaning guidelines, ensuring a thorough and effective sanitization process. And, if a cleaning crew member finds a problem during their rounds, they can create a corrective work order immediately.

You can also design preventive maintenance plans to auto-assign and auto-route work orders for tasks like more frequent cleaning rounds or HVAC filter changes. This ensures consistently safe air quality and virus free surfaces in high-occupancy spaces.

Reserve Spaces  

To maintain proper distancing requirements, students, staff, and faculty can make reservations for designated locations, like labs and libraries, directly from the portal using the robust Space solution.

When a student or staff reserves or checks out of a space, the system can auto-generate work orders to clean and sanitize it, and a mobile alert is pushed directly to their smartphone when the reserved area is ready for check-in.

Understand how your program is working by creating COVID response dashboards to monitor cleaning activity, quarantine moves, health check stations, and more.

Perform Facilities Condition Assessments

A Facilities Condition Assessment (FCA) is the analysis of the physical condition of your buildings—including age, construction, and status of individual assets.

These assessments can give you a more accurate look into how your buildings are performing—and with Nuvolo Connected Workplace, you can get a high-level view of your facility, along with a dynamic, detailed look into your individual assets. You can define estimated repair costs and simultaneously get a holistic look at your facilities.

When you’re able to keep track of the data from all of your equipment, facilities, and assets in one place, you can better forecast repairs and maintenance costs. And you can use the platform to help you see how your facilities perform when compared to recommended health and safety guidelines.

Capital Projects, Vendor Management, Sustainability—All in One Connected Platform

The Connected Workplace is a complete space, building, and services solution. You can use it to ensure your COVID response plan is running smoothly, make adjustments as necessary—and build a reliable campus management foundation for the future.

Capital Projects

We bring construction and renovation project management into campus services. We understand that these projects are part of college operations, not a separate entity.

For instance, with the Connected Workplace Projects solution, your college can easily utilize data from your current buildings. You can run reports to find information that will help with build planning, such as:

  • The service history on HVAC and air flow systems to see how well the units are performing.
  • Vendor service history to see which vendors you should use during a build.
  • Space occupancy and space utilization data for your other buildings to help design the new ones.
Field Service Management

Connected Workplace also gives you field services capabilities. Managing a team of field services technicians is highly complex; our solution eases these complexities by offering work automation and tracking capabilities.

You can manage all the variables, such as work orders, scheduling, dispatching, tasks, hours, vehicles, parts, etc. Plus, a rules-based engine built on a robust mobile application provides clear prioritization, easy engagement, and efficient completion of work orders.

We also give you smart dispatch routing so call center agents have an easier time dispatching the right technician to the exact campus location for equipment maintenance. You’ll streamline and automate work order management while keeping track of assets and parts inventory.

Having robust field service management connected to the enterprise means exceptional campus services.

Real Estate

Properly managing the campus real estate portfolio is essential. Executives, human resources, facilities, and other departments all need to know about the property you own or lease.

The Connected Workplace Real Estate solution consolidates all campus leases electronically on one platform. You can track critical dates, contacts, renewals, amendments, payments, expenses, lease terms, lease adjustments, monthly rent, insurance, and other chosen attributes. You can also create alerts and automate approval actions.

Having real estate and space data on one platform provides useful analytics, so you can easily get an in-depth report of space utilization, historical costs, and portfolio trends. For instance, space utilization reports can help you reveal opportunities for consolidating under-utilized campus facilities.

Sustainability

With the Connected Workplace Sustainability solution, you can provide your institute the ability to optimize energy consumption, track generated waste, manage water usage, and track utility and energy bills. And discover once overlooked sources of cost savings.

Our solution connects directly into your energy management systems (or utility companies) to generate live reports across all facilities. View energy consumption and expenses by just about any category: geographically, by the facility, type of utility, and more.

You’ll uncover areas for improvement, analyze your energy conservation programs’ progress, and create required compliance reports. Also, you can forecast sustainability progress and analyze environmental impacts by campus locations.

Exceptional Business Intelligence

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.

You’ll be able to see the impact of your COVID response, find areas of cost savings and improvement, and forecast needs.

Learn more about Nuvolo Connected Workplace for Higher Education and discover how you can more effectively implement COVID-related safety projects and develop a clear plan for the future.