The 黑料网 has several facilities that are constantly in use, some of them round the clock. Occasionally, these facilities require maintenance, either preventatively or correctively. A maintenance request is typically directed to the facilities management department through a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS).
Every year, AUN outsources a CMMS to process maintenance requests. However, it is reported that AUN utilizes less than 10% of the services offered by this current CMMS for which we pay so much. While the system does provide a wide range of functionalities, most are not used, while it also fails to provide several that are needed at AUN. This is where AFix comes in.
AFix is a mobile application jointly developed by Software engineering major John Wogu and Computer science seniors Mary-Comfort Agi and Louisa Asor. It is a CMMS explicitly tailored to the AUN community that aims to provide a seamless mechanism to process maintenance, from its request to its resolution.
It allows its users to request maintenance by simply filling out a form that captures the description of the problem. This request travels through a chain of concerned parties until it gets assigned to a technician who attends to it. At every step of the maintenance process, all concerned parties receive a pop-up notification on their smartphones on the progress of a request. This is necessary because it decreases the response time and provides feedback to the requester.
As a pilot project, right now the AFix domain is restricted to the dormitories on campus, such that only students and Reslife staff staying in any of the dorms would be able to make maintenance requests on the app.
Should the pilot project succeed and AFix is fully implemented, its domain could be extended to other members of the AUN community, including staff and faculty on campus and every other AUN property. The developers believe that should this happen, AUN could well save millions of naira spent in outsourcing other CMMS services--because AFix is free to use.
In addition to cost-saving, AFix, through a rigorous requirement analysis process, identifies the major functionalities from the outsourced system used by AUN and aims to incorporate them with other services that are needed but are not now available.
Written by John Wogu (Mr. AUN 2019-2021)