10 top benefits of facilities management software
The evolution of facilities management software has transformed the way businesses operate forever – and this continues to grow with each passing year.
For modern workplaces looking to extract every advantage out of their facilities and run at their most efficient and most effective, this software is a necessity, not a nice-to-have.
Yet, although its adoption worldwide is rising, many still persist with manual, archaic approaches to facilities management and miss out on the incredible benefits this technology offers.
That’s what we aim to uncover here. Read on to discover 10 of the biggest benefits that facilities management software can bring to your business.
1. Asset tracking & management
When modern facilities can be responsible for hundreds upon thousands of assets at any given time, ensuring they are all running optimally is practically impossible without the help of facilities management software.
Approaching this manually is no longer an option. Through this approach, asset locations and details fall through the cracks. Maintenance work and repairs are only conducted on a reactive basis. Life becomes more erratic for your engineers.
By enabling FMs to create accurate, comprehensive asset registers in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually, engineers can always know where an asset is, its essential specifications and insight into its performance over time.
With this clear, complete picture of all assets across your facilities, the software allows you to manage and maintain them far more closely and far more efficiently at the same time.
2. Better business decisions
A big benefit of facilities management software is in how it provides valuable information to inform your overall business strategy. Today’s companies are driven by data, and success is closely tied to how well you can capture and analyze this information.
From identifying potential cost savings and any areas of risk throughout your facilities, to real-time data on the performance of assets and employees, this essential business intelligence can all be housed in one place and made easily accessible to inform your decision-making.
In addition, by offering the capacity to immediately generate custom reports to display this data to management, colleagues and clients, facilities management software helps you present important trends to decision-makers that can be pivoted for greater cost savings and efficiencies in the future.
3. Property management
Maximizing the potential of your property portfolio is another great advantage of facilities management software. Particularly for FMs responsible for multiple sites at a time, having all information relating to rents, leases, utilities and more in one place can be a significant time-saver, and ensure no payment is overlooked or rate change is ignored.
Beyond this, having all that data to hand enables you to compare and contrast property information to see where savings might be made. Perhaps one site is saving significantly from a particular form of insulation, and you determine that it would reap the same benefits at another location? This is just one example of how having a clear picture of all property data can inspire improvements from one site to another.
Plus, by bringing BIM data into the mix, facilities management software can harness these visual models to help FMs identify assets throughout a site, identify areas of space that may be repurposed for better effect, and generally improve a building’s long-term performance.
4. Space optimization
Speaking of space management, facilities management software unlocks the ability to optimize how space is used site-wide like never before.
Prior to this technology coming of age, it was easy for organizations to fall into the trap of certain locations being heavily overpopulated, while others were barely touched. Particularly in a post-pandemic landscape, this is no longer feasible.
Thanks to this component, FMs can assess the actual space being used in your facilities, and from that whether more is required, or your existing space can be reimagined to fulfil that need. This can help you embrace modern methodologies like hot-desking and open-plan offices.
And, let’s not overlook the capacity to better organize meeting places and remove the risk of double-bookings through a facilities booking suite.
5. Project management
Overseeing a project from start to finish can be a demanding prospect. Meeting deadlines. Staying under budget. Ensuring all cogs are turning as they should. It’s an all-encompassing duty – but, fortunately, one that can be made significantly simpler through facilities management software.
By giving you a straightforward task grid, highlighting every milestone on your project’s path to completion, with all associated planned and reactive tasks listed alongside these, you can easily verify that work is being completed, and proactively determine the reason for any delays.
This puts you in a stronger position to preserve the profitability of every project, and ensure that every step is completed as cost-effectively as possible while you deliver the utmost quality.
6. Overseeing contractors
A potential headache in the pursuit of perfect project management is the need to supervise the involvement of any third-party contractors or subcontractors. Trying to keep on top of these various moving parts outside of your organization can quickly become messy and complex.
Thankfully, facilities management software can also account for this. By enabling subcontractors to feed information, such as task completion details and invoices, into your central system, this helps businesses keep a closer eye on these teams to confirm they are fulfilling their obligations.
It also gives your subcontractors access to the tools to manage their tasks most effectively. By maximising their ability to perform, this can build stronger, more trusting relationships with these third parties when they are brought in for future projects.
7. Financial control
With profitability a primary concern for most businesses, a standout benefit of facilities management software is the way it helps companies organize their financial obligations. This can be achieved in a variety of ways:
- Streamlining the management of purchase orders, ensuring you have total transparency over your orders and that all payments are allocated as they should be
- Complete quote management, allowing you to compare offerings easily to guarantee you select the supplier that offers the biggest benefit to your business, as well as deliver your own quotes to customers with absolute efficiency
- Flexible sales invoicing solutions, mapped to your exact contractual requirements, so all invoices for everything you use your system are handled automatically
Fundamentally, facilities management software enables you to cut costs across your organization, including in the way you manage your own financial information.
8. Regulatory compliance
Practically every business is subject to a crowd of contractual and industry obligations, and meeting these are critical not only to the financial well-being of your organization, but also your reputation among customers and the wider world.
Facilities management software helps you constantly meet these requirements so you’re never at risk of non-compliance. Whether this is enabling you to fulfil your SLAs or see how well you are satisfying your PFI & PPP obligations, this software can give you early warnings if you are at risk of potential liabilities, so you can take immediate action to correct these.
In addition, an effective facilities management software solution will also allow you to store SFG20 data in-line with the standards you’re expected to reach. Again, no risk of failing to comply with your objectives – all maintenance tasks are conducted to the highest possible standards.
9. Employee wellbeing
Principally, facilities management is focused on people on-site, ensuring they’re looked-after and empowered to be at their most productive. Facilities management software plays a crucial role in making sure this goal is met.
One way this is achieved is by utilizing the immense data collected by the IoT in order to make employees’ working environments as comfortable as possible. By automatically adjusting temperature, humidity and lighting to optimal levels based on occupancy and time of year, your team’s well-being will always be accounted for. And, as an added bonus, when areas aren’t occupied, systems switch off to help you save energy.
Furthermore, it empowers your professionals to take control of their day-to-day and the environment they work in. Whether that is alerting engineers to maintenance issues they notice on their rounds, to organizing their own meetings and appointments through the software, giving your employees this power can greatly reduce the burden on your helpdesk.
10. Mobility & collaboration
With so many demands on today’s facilities management teams, the ability to access key facility data from anywhere, be it at their desk or remotely through their phones, is more important than ever.
Through this capacity offered by high-quality facilities management softwares, FMs can see this information at any time to make timely, business-critical decisions, rather than allow issues to fester until they become even more costly or time-consuming to deal with.
Plus, having all of this information accessible in a single Digital Dashboard benefits your team’s ability to collaborate. As everyone can see the same data in real-time, you can seamlessly discuss these with relevant colleagues and reach a consensus on what steps you can take to improve performance, before translating that to the decision-makers in your organization.
Unlock the benefits of facilities management software in your business
Incredibly, this is just a snapshot of the benefits facilities management software can bring to your business. As the responsibilities and demands on FM professionals pile up with every passing year, introducing these solutions into your organization is more vital than ever to minimize costs, drive efficiency and make life easier for your employees.
If you’d like to know more about our Facilities Management solutions, get in touch with our team today or arrange a dedicated demo.
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