Imagine this: You manage a large arena, and it’s currently 5:00PM. The inside of the venue is empty, quiet, and most importantly, clean. Life as a facility manager is good.

At 6:00PM, just an hour later, it feels like a different building. A concert is happening that night, and thousands of people are flooding through security doors, rushing their way to their seats, getting in line for food, and going to the bathroom. Suddenly, issues around the building arise out of nowhere, and the entire facilities team, ranging from security guards to janitors and everything in between must be aligned and coordinated with one another to ensure success, safety, and cleanliness.

The reality of this situation is, well, just that: a reality. Stadium facility management (otherwise known as rush facility management) is one of the most overlooked, yet challenging scenarios that a facility manager can find themselves in, making it critical to understand what differentiates it from typical facility management, unique challenges it poses, and what you can do to make it operate smoother.

Differences Between Traditional & Stadium Facility Management

The main goal of any style of facility management is to maintain and provide a safe, efficient, and functional space, but due to the stark contrast in size and complexity between traditional and large-scale facility management, there are a few key differences to understand:

1. Scale: While it may seem obvious, the sheer scale and velocity between managing something such as an office building versus a 10,000 seat venue is massive (no pun intended), making additional resources, labor, and preparation required.
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2. Variety: In typical facility management settings, the same routine activities are performed over and over with little variability. Managing a stadium is nearly a polar opposite, with facility requirements differing on an event-by-event basis based on factors such as occupancy and event type.
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3. Spontaneity: The saying “'hope for the best, but prepare for the worst” is the best way to summarize the spontaneous nature of managing a stadium—anything can happen. In a matter of seconds, somebody could spill food in a traffic-heavy area, a toilet could overflow, or in a worst-case scenario, a medical emergency could occur, making it extremely important to have the necessary infrastructure to support any scenario that could occur, regardless of the likelihood.

Challenges of Stadium Facility Management

A very specific goal–managing a stadium–comes with very specific challenges. People not familiar with high-paced events with tens of thousands of occupants may be caught off guard by many unique obstacles a stadium can throw at them, such as:

1. Busy Entrances & Exits: If an event starts at 7:00PM, people are going to arrive an hour or two before the event. At the largest-of-the-large venues, such as football stadiums, this means upwards of 50,000 people all rushing to get in at the same time. You need to have enough entrances, security guards, and a thoroughly designed entrance plan for this amount of people to get into an event safely and quickly. This same idea applies to when people are leaving an event—there must be a well-mapped exit route for them to follow, along with an adequate amount of security.
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2. Security: The importance of security can not be emphasized enough for large-scale events. As mentioned before, anything can happen, and ensuring that there is a proper amount of well-trained security to manage an event, especially in times of crisis, is the most important thing for creating and maintaining occupant safety.
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3. Staffing: This doesn’t just apply to security—every department needs enough employees. Understaffed areas can cause long lines to arise, unhappy occupants, or unsafe situations, which each create a whole other branch of issues.
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4. One-Offs: Specific incidents are virtually bound to occur throughout the night—spilled food and drinks, broken toilets, even injuries. Aside from staff assigned specific jobs, having additional employees available for random occurrences such as these is critical to maintaining quick clean-up times.
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5. Cleaning: This is, by far, the biggest challenge that will come with a massive space. Imagine a live event with 65,000 people in attendance with an understaffed, ill-prepared cleaning department. In a matter of minutes, trash will pile up, bathrooms will run out of supplies, and depending on the weather, things like dirt, mud, water, or snow will collect over traffic-heavy walkways. After the game, the amount of trash and debris buildup will be on the cusp of being a legitimate biohazard. To avoid a nightmare scenario like this, establish an incredibly detailed cleaning plan that accounts for everything. Remember: hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

With all of this being said, many of these challenges can be avoided (or at least eased) with proper planning, training, and execution. There are even specific technologies designed to help solve some of these challenges and make your time managing a stadium *slightly* easier, which can go a long way in the context of a long, occupant-dense event.

How Technology Can Improve Stadium Facility Management

Every marginal improvement can yield major benefits in the long-term of managing stadiums, and technology is at the forefront of providing these improvements. Aside from providing practical utility, the key thing technology provides is data, which can be gathered from every event and analyzed to help improve future operations, especially in the context of cleaning.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, as hundreds of new inventions are created every year that can help aid with the above challenges. However, these are some of the most cutting-edge and relevant technologies that are readily available to aid your operations:

1. Smart Paper Towel / Toilet Paper Dispensers: We’ve already established that thousands upon thousands of people will be using the bathroom, but how do you know when to restock certain bathroom supplies? That’s where these smart dispensers come in, as they can inform managers of when supplies are running low and need to be restocked. Even better, with a little bit of analysis on the usage data, these dispensers can be utilized to provide real-time occupancy data to managers about how many people are entering the bathrooms over a given period of time, making it much easier to create cleaning and refill schedules for bathrooms.
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2. Smart Occupancy Sensors: If utilizing smart dispensers for occupancy is not feasible, smart occupancy sensors that detect who, when, and where enter restrooms or other areas are direct alternatives. Utilizing these sensors can help build historical data on when areas become densely populated, as well as inform facilities staff on when bathrooms may need to be cleaned and/or restocked.
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3. QR Codes: Many people just consider QR codes to be an interesting yet relatively one-dimensional piece of technology, but the reality is that they have dozens of use cases. The value of QR codes for stadium facility management is the cleaning validation capability they provide to custodial staff to ensure that every area in a large venue is being cleaned and documented on time.

Conclusion

Facility management for massive events hosting tens of thousands of people is vastly different from typical facility management that most are used to. Like any large-scale operation, it comes with unique challenges and opportunities that must be accounted for ahead of time to ensure safe, timely, and most importantly, clean, success.

Additionally, ensuring that all preparations and decisions are informed by quality data is key to having success. By utilizing modern technologies, facility managers can set standards of transparency for their whole staff, and ultimately make the facility management process smoother for themselves, their staff, and occupants.