Megha Tatiya
Facilities and Property Management SME
Years with MIL: 1
What were you doing before joining MIL?
Before joining MIL, I was a systems engineer and administrator at Hospitality Service NA Corp. In this position I was responsible for managing the migration of company’s legacy service desk system to the new system. The biggest challenge was to create a unified service desk solution supporting company locations across geographies.
Why did you decide to join MIL?
NIST’s Facilities and Property Management Subject Matter Expert (SME) position at MIL was equally exciting and challenging in terms of leveraging my past experience in operations and maintenance into a new domain of facilities and property management. This position also gave me an opportunity to venture into implementing and supporting federal systems.
What are you working on now?
Currently, I am a SME for the automated facilities and property management systems within NIST’s Office of Facilities and Property Management (OFPM). In this role, I am responsible for managing systems for asset tracking, inventory and storeroom management, work order management, as well as preventive maintenance using IBM Maximo 7.5 with Maximo Mobile 7.5.
What is important about your work?
Through my work I am able to contribute towards OFPM’s mission of successfully planning, building, operating, maintaining, and servicing NIST’s facilities to provide a safe, secure, and sustainable environment for the community.
Why do you enjoy working at MIL?
Not only is my work rewarding at MIL, but the supervisors and support teams are just a phone call or an email away and always willing to help. Being surrounded by such wonderful people encourages us to give our best and work hard. Having an opportunity to work with SME’s from different and diverse operations team and get insights on how facility management functions and operates is one of the best aspects of my job. A very beautiful campus is a big bonus!
What is the most challenging project you’ve worked on at MIL?
This year’s annual physical inventory at NIST’s Facilities Services division was one of the most challenging project I worked on at MIL. It involved replacing the Motorola MC9090 Windows Scanners with the TC70 Android Scanner and conducting the inventory.
During this project, I served as a liaison between the IT technical team and the customers, working to help them test and approve the scanners. I spent considerable amount of time helping the storeroom personnel, working to prepare for the inventory, conduct pre-inventory spot checks, and reviewing the entire inventory process. Additionally, I participated in checking all of the reports and database queries, rewriting and creating new queries, as well as completing a trial run of the inventory process to insure that everything was ready. During the inventory, I provided support for troubleshooting the scanners, guidance and advice on the inventory process, and provided additional data and analysis when requested. Ultimately, the project was a huge success and the customer was satisfied with the results.