6 features of facilities management software that will transform your business
Explore the essential features of facilities management software that will leave a huge positive impression on the efficiency, productivity and quality of your business.
As commercial and residential facilities become more complex, expansive and sophisticated, we move further and further away from a time when “traditional” methods of facilities management were still applicable.
Clunky spreadsheets. Cabinets packed with documents. Tasks written on pen and paper. The industry has evolved past these slow, impractical approaches. Now, optimising the way you look after your properties and those who use them is only achievable with the right facilities management software.
With the right solution in place, facilities management software can resolve a variety of problems and enable FM teams to be more proactive, more efficient and more informed in how they approach managing their organisations.
But, what is worse than having a problem to solve? Believing you have found the solution, only to later discover it isn’t fit for purpose. Not all examples of facilities management software are created equal, with some lacking the features and capabilities that can truly transform your business for the better.
With an ever-growing list of options on the market, finding the software that fits your needs is becoming tougher and more time-consuming.
To help streamline your search, we have identified 6 of the most critical features and functions that quality facilities management software should include to have the most transformative impact on your business.
1. Asset Management
What is it?
A company’s assets, be they physical or digital, are the cogs that keep businesses running like clockwork on a daily basis. The asset management component of your facilities management software should produce a clear, comprehensive picture of the assets across your organisation, and the details that engineers need to know to run these most efficiently.
How does it make a difference?
Modern facilities are responsible for thousands of assets at any given time. Trying to track all of the unique details behind each component manually is practically impossible. It is incredibly time-consuming, will require multiple people to be solely responsible for monitoring and updating data when necessary, and heightens the risk of errors and oversights.
The right facilities management software should allow you to map the assets throughout your buildings, with critical information such as their model number, date of installation, vital specifications, and expected life expectancy.
This will make it faster and easier for your engineers to locate assets when maintenance work is done, give you a complete grasp over everything under your domain, and help guide strategic decisions over what assets your purchase and use on a regular basis.
For the best results, your facilities management software should:
- Track assets’ locations in your facilities, perhaps in combination with BIM modelling
- Contain all necessary specifications and imagery in an easy-to-access manner
- Monitor and provide data relating to performance in real-time
- Centralise all of your asset data into a single location
- Enable you to set consistent asset classifications to organise data far better
- Allow you to tag particular assets with unique identifiers
- Prioritise asset registers based on maintenance requirements and other factors
2. Preventative Maintenance
What is it?
Preventative maintenance is work actively performed on assets and equipment on a regular basis, with the aim of keeping them in peak condition for longer and reducing the likelihood of failures occurring.
How does it make a difference?
While reactive maintenance will always be an important consideration in any organisation, more often than not it is just a temporary bandage for a potentially gaping wound. By only performing maintenance on equipment when it fails or at arbitrary dates, this can:
- Greatly reduce the longevity of your assets
- Increase expenditure on replacement parts and equipment
- Lead to costly periods of downtime while repairs are made
- Reduce overall operations depending on the significance of the affected asset
Instead, your facilities management software should incorporate modules that allow you to be proactive in how your assets are maintained. By putting you on the front foot on PPM schedules, your assets will run more efficiently for longer periods of time, over time saving you money on needing to acquire replacements and downtime.
For the best results, your facilities management software should:
- Allow you to create clear, trackable maintenance schedules
- Automatically suggest updates to PPM schedules based on asset behaviour
- Manage and track facility inventory and vendor relationships to secure replacements
- Keep tabs on your compliance with industry maintenance standards
- Enable engineers to upload images and files related to maintenance tasks
- Deliver automatic notifications and alerts of when tasks must be performed
- Store an easy-to-follow audit trail of maintenance performed on each asset
3. Workflow Organisation
What is it?
Your team of engineers, both directly part of your business and those brought in from external contractors, are the lifeblood of how your organisation operates day-to-day. To ensure their time is being applied most effectively, workflow management is vital for tasks to be completed smoothly and at the right time.
How does it make a difference?
Prior to the development of facilities management software, it would be all too easy for task lists to become lost, muddled or disorganised. This meant important tasks could often be missed or delayed, and engineers’ schedules are shattered by picking up on these mislaid duties.
Consequently, this can lead to faulty assets impacting the performance of your business, and areas of your facilities becoming unclean or dishevelled due to a lack of care, which in turn creates an unwelcome environment for employees, residents and visitors.
By including a workflow organisation tool within your facilities management platform, this synchronises and centralises all aspects of task management. Engineers are clear on what needs to be done and when, and their days can be coordinated more succinctly to ensure they are working at peak efficiency.
For the best results, your facilities management software should:
- Be accessible across all devices, especially on mobile
- Have a system that determines the priority of tasks based on feedback
- Automatically distribute tasks to relevant engineers to fit their schedules
- Include a sign-off process when tasks are completed to ensure accountability
- Present easy-to-understand dashboards for users to track their workload
- Link all systems together into one integrated system for seamless performance
- Open up the same capabilities to subcontractors to keep them accountable
4. Space Management
What is it?
Whether your facility extends across multiple floors and locations, or is contained in a single building, it will have space that needs to be put to use. Space management is focused on making the absolute most of this available space to minimise waste and drive efficiency.
How does it make a difference?
In our experience working with FM professionals worldwide, a lot of organisations don’t take full advantage of the space it is afforded. This covers situations where certain rooms or meeting areas are left vacant 95% of the time, to the complete opposite – spaces that are typically crowded or booked out, causing confusion within teams and a drop in productivity.
Effective facilities management software should include a space management solution to capture the spatial data across your site and pinpoint opportunities where space could be better managed. This will mean you aren’t wasting money on maintaining and powering unused spaces, and identifying areas that could be better employed as storage or meeting spaces.
Particularly in a post-COVID landscape where businesses need to be more conscious of areas that are often overcrowded in their facilities, space management technology is a vital component in enhancing efficiency and protecting employee wellbeing.
For the best results, your facilities management software should:
- Gather real-time data relating to occupancy of your rooms, desks and other areas
- Support automatic, seamless room scheduling across your company
- Allow interactive floor plans to be drawn up and stored for ongoing analysis
- Present space utilisation data in clear, easy-to-digest dashboards
- Welcome and monitor visitors and others during their stay on-site
- Track and schedule people and assets’ movement throughout your facilities
5. Smart Building Integration
What is it?
Buildings are becoming smarter with every passing day. As assets become more interconnected and capable of capturing a substantial amount of data that may be harnessed to optimise performance, it is important that facilities management software is able to help FM teams put this data to work.
How does it make a difference?
From the use of sensors in plumbing infrastructure to verify the cleanliness and quality of your water, to tracking energy usage across your spaces at various points of the day, today’s smart buildings can deliver incredibly valuable data to inform how it operates.
By providing a central space to track and collect this useful data on a daily basis, the right facilities management tool can take the efficiency and productivity of your business to new heights, and implement change that saves you significant sums of money over time.
Plus, again in the post-COVID landscape, features like the ability to track air quality and adjust ventilation levels based on the number of people within a space at a given time will offer a lot of reassurance to employees, residents and others over their safety.
For the best results, your facilities management software should:
- Connect and communicate with smart sensors and monitors across your facilities
- Capture key data and present this in a straightforward, digestible format
- Seamlessly integrate with 3rd-party software
- Help create the conditions for a more comfortable, welcoming workspace
- Monitor energy usage and automatically adjust this according to occupancy
- Reduce the helpdesk workload through automated alerts to FM professionals
6. Reporting & BI
What is it?
Data drives today’s businesses forward, depending on how much of it you are able to capture and utilise. Facilities management software should be able to lend a hand through its BI (Business Intelligence) and reporting capabilities, allowing FM professionals to take complete control of their data, publish their findings, and strategize for the future.
How does it make a difference?
At any point in time, there will be a vast amount of data generated by devices across your properties – data that can be a powerful guide on ways to reduce running costs, optimise efficiency and make working environments better for employees. However, if this is not collated together and formatted in an easy-to-understand way, that information can go to waste and the business is left running in place.
The best facilities management software on the market should remove that prospect by making seamless containing all of this data in one place, and projecting it in an actionable way for FM professionals. Through this technology, your teams should be able to access and gain insight into key performance trends, which can then form the basis for strategic discussion.
In addition, it should then be just as simple to convert this information into clear, custom reports, that can be immediately passed onto relevant internal and external recipients. Again, by taking the hassle out of producing standalone, facilities management software enables your staff to work more efficiently and devote more time to analysing and discussing reports rather than creating them.
For the best results, your facilities management software should:
- Capture critical business data in real-time into one manageable, filterable location
- Present data in comprehensible digital dashboards, with a simple user interface
- Make it possible for users to locate and interact with data in a matter of clicks
- Allow for reports to be customised and branded based on your team’s requirements
- Automatically schedule and send reports to relevant people at pre-set times
How MRI Evolution Can Transform Your Business
In order for your facilities management software to have the revolutionary impact on your business that it should have, it must incorporate these 6 critical features. These factors contribute to a truly game-changing building management solution – one that takes control of the increasingly complex demands placed on FM professionals, and enables your organisation to be at its most efficient and productive.
MRI Evolution delivers these essential features and so much more. By bringing teams, data and processes together in one simple-to-use solution, MRI Evolution is empowering teams to plan, manage and maintain their facilities more effectively than ever before. It’s one wholly integrated ecosystem, configured to your exact requirements.
- End-to-end insight over your operations
- Comprehensive task management across your facilities
- Total oversight over your budgets and spending
- Completely branded to match your business
Talk to our team today and get started with MRI Evolution.
Leading solutions for property occupiers, owners and service providers & contractors.Facilities Management software
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