Facility Management for Efficient Service Delivery in Federal Polytechnic Offa, Kwara State: A Technological Approach

Abstract

Facilities management (FM) is a function that adapts because of changing external environment. Priority Service Provider (PSP) is one method used by FM to deliver this change in strategy. There is an estimated 323 million PSP usage in over 70 countries out of over 550 billion industries worldwide. This research explored FM and the invention of Priority Service Provider PSP technology to facilitate customer problems in public and tertiary institutions. The study aimed to eradicate long queues and personal influence in delivering products and services in a remote environment. To achieve this, low-cost, portable microcontroller-based electronic queue control (EQC) systems have been developed to control queues with the parameter of Federal Polytechnic Offa campuses to identify dense population areas in tertiary institutions' service units. Two different queue control systems have been implemented with slightly different features. In system-1, a general display has been used for displaying token numbers and service counter numbers, whereas, in system-2, each token number is displayed individually in each service counter with separate displays. In both systems, each visitor has to collect a token and then will be served whenever the token number is displayed. Integrated Arduino UNO carried out the experimental study to create an artefact. The control programs have been developed using the Arduino C programming language. Finally, the systems have been tested under different conditions to evaluate their performance.