How UNC Standardized Work Orders Across 11 Sites

UNC Health is a not-for-profit, statewide integrated health care system in North Carolina — operating around 16 hospitals on 20 campuses as part of its network. Collectively, this system supports a hospital bed capacity of more than 900–1,000 beds at its main academic medical center. In 2025, Director of Plant Operations, Alan Pennington, inherited 11 sites each run by different directors and using different workflows and role setups.

Team members from UNC Health Hillsborough and Chatham

The result: inconsistent work requests, fragmented reports, and managers spending time on status calls instead of overseeing operations.

The core question: how do you standardize a distributed operation without disrupting high-volume medical-center work? FSI worked with the UNC Facilities team to roll out a phased standardization that included:

• Consolidated role configurations so requestors at different sites see the same common problems and filters.
• Built standardized work-request filters and shared reports/dashboards to visualize completion and gaps in ITMS.
• Implemented analytics to track productivity, hours, service requests vs. project tasks, and identify weak points (notably project management).
• Deployed eBinders and a rounding tool at select sites.
• Performed a staged switchover across six sites (including the Medical Center, Rex, Hillsborough, Chatham, Holly Springs, Chapel Hill) with weekly FSI check-ins to ensure data readiness and continuity.

The roll-out delivered a seamless switchover — even at the high-volume Medical Center, where work requests were ready on day one. With standardized problem lists and filters, requestors across all sites now follow the same process, reducing confusion and errors. Consistent Monday-morning reports have also cut down on phone calls and reactive status updates and enhanced analytics revealed key operational gaps, particularly in project tracking, giving the team clear areas for improvement.

Interested in hearing more on how FSI's suite of solutions empowers healthcare maintenance teams with purpose-built tools? Contact us here.