Following a rigorous review of material submitted for APPA’s Award for Excellence in Facilities Management (AFE) and site visits by a team of seasoned campus facilities professionals, APPA announced that the University of Arizona (UArizona) and the University of Houston (UH) are the 2023 recipients of APPA’s highest institutional award.
Key campus stats
University of Arizona
- Nearly 47,000 students
- 140+ buildings
- 13 million gsf
- 392 acres
- 600+ facilities professionals on staff
University of Houston
- Nearly 47,000 students
- 150+ buildings
- 16.5 million gsf
- 897 acres
- 450+ facilities professionals on staff
Each year, APPA’s awards and recognition program recognizes individual and institutional excellence and achievement throughout educational facilities. The mission of the APPA Awards Program is to:
- Identify and encourage individual and institutional excellence in facilities management.
- Encourage and promote active participation in APPA’s programs and services.
The APPA Award for Excellence in Facilities Management is designed to recognize and advance excellence in educational facilities. Established in 1988, the AFE highlights the essential role of facilities operations in the overall institutional mission and vision. AFE nominations are evaluated using seven key criteria: leadership, strategic and operational planning, customer focus, information and analysis, development and management of human resources, process management, and performance results.
When informed that UArizona had earned the 2023 AFE, President Robert C. Robbins stated: “It gives me great pleasure to congratulate Chris Kopach and the facilities management team for receiving APPA’s Award for Excellence…. This award speaks volumes in terms of the dedication of our facilities team in supporting the overall mission of the university and providing a beautiful campus environment for our faculty, staff, students, and visitors.”
View the University of Arizona’s AFE video.
In her endorsement letter to the APPA AFE review team, UH Chancellor and President Renu Khator wrote: “The UH F/CM team has shown time and time again their commitment to supporting the University with their unwavering dedication and pursuit of customer service excellence along with an extensive commitment to Building Futures, Maintaining Excellence….The F/CM team has been a critical part of executing the strategic vision of UH.”
View the University of Houston’s AFE video.
The AFE designation is valid for five years; UArizona also applied for and successfully earned the award in 2013 and 2018.
How has the AFE been meaningful to the FM staff, and how will you leverage the award’s outcomes going forward?
“The APPA Award for Excellence allows our staff to be recognized for all the diverse and outstanding work they perform on a daily basis. The University of Arizona Facilities Management staff has taken a great deal of pride in receiving this award each time we’ve applied.
“This award allows the FM team to continue to partner with our campus community, students, staff, and faculty in demonstrating the leadership qualities of the department in innovation, customer service, and overall teamwork. We all work as one team in supporting the University of Arizona. It’s all about the team, the team, the team!”
—Chris Kopach, CEFP
Past APPA President and Associate Vice President for Facilities Management
University of Arizona
“For the University of Houston F/CM, this was an important milestone on the institution’s path to excellence. Our recent inclusion into the Big 12, recognition as a top-tier research institution, and many other achievements require that the facilities meet UH’s aspirations. While being recognized as an APPA AFE recipient is a great achievement, the journey began and continues to be about developing an organization that is Building Futures and Maintaining Excellence!
“The pride of ownership in the organization is evident, with many references to this significant milestone throughout daily conversations. Being recognized for doing a great job has been and will always be important for a team, and we are taking the opportunity to promote this award throughout the university.
“To also help celebrate, we have initiated our APPA Ambassador program. All F/CM team members will have the opportunity to provide nominations for individuals to travel with us to Nashville, Tennessee, and represent UH F/CM in receiving the award at the APPA 2024 Spring Conference. There will be voting to select the APPA Ambassadors who will attend the official award presentation in Nashville.”
—David Oliver, P.E.
Senior Associate Vice Chancellor/AVP for Facilities/Construction Management
University of Houston
INSTITUTIONAL AWARDS
In addition to the Award for Excellence, APPA’s Institutional categories include the Effective and Innovative Practices Award and the Sustainability Innovation Award.
Effective and Innovative Practices Award
First awarded in 2004, APPA’s Effective and Innovative Practices Award recognizes programs and processes that enhance service delivery, lower costs, increase productivity, improve customer service, generate revenue, or otherwise benefit the educational institution. Award nomination entries must describe either a new program or a significant restructuring of an existing program or process.
The broad range of projects and programs recognized from past winning E&I submittals have included collaborations for student success; smart restroom technology; APPA credentialing cohort program; inventory management; employee video archive; and more. Institutions may submit up to three different programs each year for consideration of the E&I Practices Award.
The 2023 Effective and Innovative Practices Award recipients are:
- California State University’s Women in Facilities program
To promote leadership development and address gender gap issues within the facilities departments of the California State University System’s 23 campuses, the Women in Facilities program launched in fall 2021. Its main goals are to: -
- Create learning sessions and interactions to expose women in facilities to the structures and systems in the organizations and invite key campus customers and stakeholders to facilitate discussions about their experiences with and expectations of the facilities organization;
- Provide an open, safe, and humanizing space for women to dialogue about working in male-dominated environments and provide tools to help women navigate these environments;
- Provide skill-building and career-planning sessions and monthly Zoom meetups to support women.
- University of Alabama Custodial Summer Housing Operations Process Improvement Initiative
During the transition between academic years, UA Custodial Services is responsible for turning around 3,328 suites in 12 weeks to provide incoming students with a world-class campus environment while accommodating 60+ summer camps, summer school, and various other activities requiring an overnight stay. This monumental task requires collaboration with a host of university stakeholders to ensure on-time delivery of services and the best possible student experience.
To accomplish this goal, UA Custodial Services embarked upon a process improvement initiative to improve customer satisfaction, increase efficiency, reduce turnaround time, and streamline operations. As a result, several management tools were developed and deployed to ensure success including Labor Forecasting, Initial Clean Inspection Processes, Final Clean Inspection Processes, Optimized Task Management, Daily Reporting and Progress Management.
The UA Custodial Summer Housing Operations Process Improvement Initiative has substantially improved reliability and efficiency, thereby offering substantial institutional benefit to the university.
Sustainability Innovation Award
This award was introduced in 2012 as a campus-wide sustainability assessment program but has more recently evolved into focusing on specific innovative applications. APPA’s Sustainability Innovation Award in Facilities Management is awarded to educational institutions that have implemented a significant or transformative program and/or processes that enhance service delivery, lower costs, create a green and/or sustainable environment, or otherwise benefit the educational institution by supporting student success and environmental stewardship. Award nomination entries must describe either one new program or a significant restructuring of an existing program or process.
The 2023 Sustainability Innovation Award recipient is the University of California Davis for its Small Workplace Automation & Remote Monitoring Program (SWARM). According to the university’s application, SWARM “targets small, temporary, or isolated buildings on campus and integrates a remote, centralized HVAC monitoring system by way of wireless thermostats. The project is mainly led and executed by student interns on the Energy & Engineering team in Facilities Management. Not only are students gaining valuable hands-on experience with real systems and data analysis, but this experience is directly contributing to UC Davis’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative.”
INDIVIDUAL AWARDS
APPA Fellow
The pinnacle of APPA’s individual awards is the APPA Fellow designation. The bar is set high by the Fellow criteria:
- Leadership: Progressive advancement in the field of educational facilities management
- Innovation: Advancement of the body of knowledge of educational facilities management practice.
- Service: Be an employee (including Emeritus) of an active APPA member institution for at least ten consecutive years and demonstrated active or engaged participation.
- Lifelong Development: A record of continual lifelong personal and professional development in educational facilities management.
The 2023 APPA Fellow recipient is Theodore J. (Ted) Weidner, longtime APPA member and professor of engineering practice at Purdue University. Ted had a long career as a senior facilities professional at Eastern Illinois University, UMass Amherst, and the University of Nebraska Lincoln before focusing on consulting and his tenured faculty position at Purdue.
Ted’s professional career has coincided with his long string of major contributions to APPA programming, services, and publications. To name only a few, he wrote numerous articles for Facilities Manager, including nearly 300 book reviews; content review, teaching, and other contributions to APPA’s certification program; presentations at APPA and regional conferences, as well as at APPA U and specialized seminars; and team member for numerous Facilities Management Evaluation Program and APPA Advisors reviews.
In recent years Ted collaborated on the revised editions of the Operational Guidelines for Educational Facilities trilogy, including leading the updates for the Maintenance book (as he had done for the previous two editions) and working with editor-in-chief Tom Becker on the major revision to the Custodial publication.
Upon hearing the news that he had been selected as the newest APPA Fellow, Ted said, “There aren’t many APPA Fellows, and they are a special group of men and women. They have assisted others in the educational facilities industry as well as managed significant challenges, many challenges that highly paid professionals have not been able to tackle. Floods, windstorms, financial restrictions, regulations, a pandemic, and more…they have done it. My involvement with APPA has been minor but driven from opportunities that I saw. I’m deeply honored to be recognized for my small contributions.”
Pacesetter Award
The Pacesetter Award recognizes personal leadership and encourages continued participation in APPA among members who have made significant contributions to their regions or chapters. Up to seven Pacesetter Awards may be given each year.
The 2023 recipients of APPA’s Pacesetter Award are:
- Priti Bhatia, Georgia Institute of Technology (SRAPPA region)
- Phillip Melnick, Pennsylvania State University (ERAPPA region)
- Angie Mitchell, Southeast Missouri State University (CAPPA region)
Rex Dillow Award for Outstanding Article
The Rex Dillow Award is presented to the author or authors of the best article published in Facilities Manager magazine during the previous year. Eligible articles are those written by a full-time employee, from any department, of an APPA member institution. Selection is based on five categories: content, interest, readability, applicability, and ease of editing.
The 2023 recipients of the Rex Dillow Award are Dan Bollman and Adam Lawver of Michigan State University. Their article, “Connecting People to Places: Michigan State University’s Use of Mobile Technologies,” was published in the July/August 2023 issue of Facilities Manager. The authors adapted the article from their presentation at the March 2023 APPA workshop, Space and All Its Entanglements.
Meritorious Service Award
Steve Glazner recently retired as APPA’s director of knowledge management and editor of Facilities Manager. Read his farewell to APPA here. He can be reached at [email protected]. Many thanks to Holly Judd for her assistance with this article.
