Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Middle East

Designed to empower Saudi women in achieving their ambitions, the Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University is the world’s largest university for women, welcoming over 40,000 students. Dar had master planned, designed, and supervised the construction of the entire campus – including the academic buildings as well as all infrastructure networks, landscapes, and internal road and transportation networks. To maintain the iconic campus and enhance the student experience, Dar was also commissioned to provide extensive facilities management services for the university.

Facilities Management

Educational

The challenge:

As the Managing Agent, Dar was responsible for maintaining a vast campus with a built-up area of 2.8 million m², including academic buildings, housing, and infrastructure – an effort that required intricate coordination and highly effective resource allocation.  

The solution:  

Dar delivered a visionary performance-managed and automated maintenance system – with no equivalent in the Kingdom’s market at that time – carefully crafted to meet the specific needs of the university and considered a model in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Dar was also responsible for extensive capacity building programs that empowered staff to utilise cutting-edge technologies and overcome transition decay within very short periods of time, for the benefit of the entire campus community.  

In delivering these service Dar’s facilities management experts:  

• Registered, tracked, and proactively managed over 121,600 assets in over 62,261 registered locations, through a comprehensive asset management strategy, along with over 15,100 spare parts and consumables.
• Generated more than 140,000 preventive maintenance activities annually and handled over 2,260 issue classifications, covering civil and electrical systems, general services, landscape, low-current systems, mechanical systems, the printing press, safety, and other soft facility management services.  
• Supervised six facility management service providers covering the academic zone; the housing area and iconic buildings; the utilities, service strip and all other outdoor areas; all IT operational services; physical security for the whole campus; and the automated people transit system and all related facilities and systems.    

Results:

As the Managing Agent for the university, Dar was able to:

• Initiate an energy management program which reduced utility costs by 18% in the first year, followed by additional savings of 9%, 5%, and 2% as the program matured, with cumulative savings (over four years) of up to USD 31.5 million.  
• Standardise procurement processes and bulk purchasing strategies for maintenance supplies and services, ensuring more cost-effective sourcing.  
• Develop an automated, performance-driven maintenance management system by defining strategic KPIs, measuring them frequently, and reimbursing the service providers based on achieved performance. This unique approach substantially enhanced the performance of the service providers’ maintenance programs.
• Integrate comprehensive environmental and sustainability practices within the facilities management strategy.  
• Implement robust health and safety protocols across the campus.  

By implementing these measures, Dar’s experts were able to prolong the lifecycle of the assets across the campus and lower failure rates and resource consumption rates significantly, with on-time preventive maintenance programs.

Most importantly, Dar was able to build and shape a culture of accountability, transparency, ongoing measurement, and continuous performance improvement —  all aimed at enhancing operations and offering greater value to the university’s employees, faculty, administration, and generations of students.