Established in 1861 in Seattle, the University of Washington (UW) is one of the oldest and most respected public flagship research universities on the West Coast, consistently ranked among the top 15 universities in the world by a variety of international publications.

Serving close to 46 thousand students, UW encompasses 500 buildings and over 20 million gross square footage of space, including over 26 university libraries, the UW Tower office building, art centers, museums, lecture halls, laboratories and conference centers.

In 2017 the University decided to change its time policy extending class hours to accommodate a growing pressure on classroom availability for new students. This created new challenges for management, affecting student services and elevating the workload for UW staff. 

To seize future opportunities in the US Higher Education market, UW needed to optimize and streamline its infrastructure management. With U-Planner, UW obtained objective data-based analysis to understand its infrastructure use, identifying those departments that would be most affected by policy changes, and uncovering best practices that could help increase the desired impact of these changes. 

“The University of Washington is a highly respected institution and at U-Planner we felt honored to partner in the development of a solution to address their needs. This was exactly the opportunity we were looking for to show our capabilities in the US”.
Erik Goldenberg. U-Planner Senior Consultant

The challenge of enabling University resources and infrastructure with digital education technology

UW has a decentralized system, in which each school requests classroom space for its courses for the next academic term. The Registrar’s Office is the unit responsible for allocating infrastructure and approving schedules.

To maximize efficiency, UW proposed a new time policy that required schools to balance their use of infrastructure over the new extended available hours. Nevertheless, the effects of this time policy had not been fully studied and there was uncertainty about the impact on schools. 

Additionally, some time slots and classrooms were more requested than others, complicating optimal booking. This pushed deadlines and duplicated tasks, as new schedule and classroom options had to be created.

 Any rejected courses need to be manually reallocated, which in turn require the Registrar to coordinate with each school directly, over the phone, to agree on a new time schedule and classroom. In addition to being time-consuming, this solution involved multiple people, adding cost and friction to the whole process.

“Thanks to U-Planner, UW identified opportunities to improve the use of its resources and infrastructure. Objective data and analytics helped us enable infrastructure and new processes to further the quality of education for our student body, simplifying work for faculty and staff. U-Planner provided services in a very timely manner, at an affordable cost to the University, with great professionalism and value”. 
Phil Reid, UW Vice Provost

How U-Planner helped improve UW’s classroom allocation process

UW contracted U-Planner to extract knowledge from available data, and obtain expert analysis and visualizations to understand how infrastructure was currently being used, what departments would be most affected by the Policy change, and what optimization opportunities and best practices could be applied. 

U-Planner worked side by side with Registrar’s Office to understand the specifics of UW’s infrastructure rules and policies, and in a short 3-month time frame provided actionable knowledge, improvement opportunities and valuable visualizations.

In particular, U-Planner used its proprietary algorithms running on the Microsoft Azure Cloud to sift through 6 semesters of data to find patterns, identify issues and help understand potential bottlenecks and alternative solutions to these.

“UW was great to work with. They have highly qualified people, processes and data. We used our experience and proprietary algorithms to analyze data, finding bottlenecks and allowing us to provide specific strategies and suggestions to UW. Once UW’s rules and policies were clear, the work was straightforward based on our extensive experience on resource planning and optimization, including reporting and rich visualizations”. 
Sebastian Flores, U-Planner Chief Data Officer

Overall efficiency gains and cost reductions in UW’s entire classroom allocation process, in just 3 months

U-Planner’s software and data analysis enabled UW to identify and address key challenges in a 3-month period. As a result, the schools facing the most issues were identified, as well as infrastructure related bottlenecks. Additionally, UW gleaned key insights to redesign its new time policy and leverage best practices to drive continuous improvement. 

The objective analysis of data produced by U-Planner’s tools also helped detect infrastructure improvement opportunities which were proposed to the University board. With this data in hand, UW was able to find quick and low-cost ways to streamline infrastructure management and increase classroom availability to suit school’s needs.