Facilities & Operations Intern for The Philadelphia School District
Since September I have worked as an intern in the Facilities and Operations Department for The School District of Philadelphia. The School District of Philadelphia manages the operations of over 200 schools and are responsible for keeping each one up and running for everyday of the school year.
For my first major project I was tasked with figuring out a way to make ordering heating oil easier and more efficient. In the beginning, over 300 building engineers had to call into the office every day and report how much oil they used. Then the person taking the orders had to separate the orders by vendor. My solution to this was creating an online form where the building engineer could log on, fill in the boxes that were provided, hit submit and that gets sent to me in a spreadsheet. From this spread sheet I can see all the information about their current school and the amount of heating oil they should order. I now can just sort the schools by vendor and email each separate order to their respective vendor. I am currently working on a way to have the spreadsheet automatically filter and send the orders to each vendor.
Another project that I have been a part of has been implementing ARCHIBUS, which is a new work order system that will go live in December. With this I have been tasked with helping the engineers understand the software and make sure they are able to use the software by this date. I have had to keep notes on all the issues that the building engineers have had using it and work with the Director of Technology for school district to find solutions to either make it easier to use or figure out ways to make them understand it.
A daily project I work on is keeping our Microsoft Access database updated for Timetrak. This keeps track of punches and absences for all of the employees that work in our department including building engineers, custodial staff, warehouse staff and trainees.