The challenge: eight ways to ask for help
The Royal Melbourne Hospital serves more than 550,000 people through two major campuses, specialist facilities and 12 satellite locations. More than 600 facilities management employees support the environment in which clinical care is delivered.
Before the transformation, hospital staff could request facilities services in eight different ways, including pagers, messaging systems, telephones, tickets and paper forms. This made demand difficult to coordinate, limited operational visibility and placed avoidable administration between frontline teams and the services they needed.
The Hospital's board approved an integrated workplace management program in November 2018. IBM TRIRIGA was selected as the common platform for service requests, work, asset and facilities information.
Going live during COVID-19
The program's planned rollout changed rapidly when COVID-19 reached Australia. The Hospital accelerated the launch and went live on 31 March 2020 as demand for infectious cleaning, waste removal and other essential services increased sharply.
A single digital portal replaced fragmented request channels. Mobile work allocation and common status information gave hospital teams a clearer, faster way to coordinate services while the operational pressure was at its highest.
A mobile operating environment
Facilities teams moved from paper and pagers to a mobile operating environment. Requests, work assignments and status information could be captured consistently, giving teams a shared view of demand and progress across the hospital network.
The platform also created a reliable data foundation for dashboards and continuous improvement. Leaders could see service demand, compare response performance and direct resources using current operational information rather than disconnected records.
- One portal for facilities services in place of eight request channels.
- Mobile task allocation and status updates for frontline service teams.
- Consistent service data for reporting, performance management and planning.
- Better visibility of patient transfers, cleaning and other critical operational workflows.
Measured outcomes
By mid-2023, the digital environment had processed more than 1.5 million tasks and more than 500,000 internal patient transfers. The Hospital reported an 85 per cent improvement in discharge-clean response time and an 84 per cent reduction in response time for patient transfers to the Transit Lounge.
Digitisation also reduced paper consumption, printing and paging costs by 34 per cent. IBM reports that optimisation of paper-based processes eliminated 110 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions.
Trixi's role
Trixi supported the Hospital with implementation, operational design, configuration and reporting. The work translated real hospital processes into service requests, mobile tasks and dashboards that frontline teams could use under demanding conditions.
As the program matured, Trixi provided additional configuration and reporting to extend the platform around changing operational requirements. The focus remained practical: make work easier to request, clearer to manage and more measurable at scale.
Where the platform went next
The initial facilities transformation became a foundation for further integration. Trixi subsequently connected electronic medical records, work management and IoT data to simplify patient transport, bed-cleaning and usage-based service workflows.
IBM TRIRIGA has since evolved into IBM Maximo Real Estate and Facilities. The product name has changed, but the operating principle remains the same: connect asset, facility, work and service information so teams can make better decisions and deliver better experiences.