The Importance of a Facility Management System

Back in the day, facility management involved caretaking, repairs, cleaning, and maintenance. This has changed significantly with facilities management covering a much larger scope that includes health and safety, real estate, financial, and contract management, and building and engineering services.

The International Facility Management Association (IFMA) defines facility management as a profession that encompasses multiple disciplines to ensure functionality, comfort, safety, and efficiency of the built environment by integrating people, place, process, and technology.

Facilities management is an immense task and unceasing challenge for companies managing a workforce, physical resources and assets, and space utilization while ensuring corporate social responsibility. Thus, it plays a strategic role in impacting costs, efficiency, compliance, and sustainability.  This requires facilities management team to be responsive and actively involved in strategy planning activities. However, research by Deloitte found that only around 20% of facility managers spend their time on planning while 53% spend their time on day-to-day operations.

Ditch Systems That Don’t Work

Technology has driven change for increased business efficiency. When spreadsheets first emerged, it was considered to be a momentous improvement that replaced traditional paper-based processes. However, spreadsheets are now seeing their end of life in facility management operations with the development of sophisticated, computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS).

While spreadsheets can capture, manipulate, and display data, they lack the capabilities that a database offers when it comes to asset planning and management. Using spreadsheets is cumbersome and tedious, and they are not designed for real-time changes. Moreover, a spreadsheet is only as good as its formulas and data input increasing the risk for manual errors that are often missed until it’s too late.

Facilities management has to focus on too many moving parts that can be effectivity monitored with a manual process. And making critical decisions without reliable data can lead to a number of issues that can quickly spiral out of control resulting in liabilities.

Benefits of a CMMS

A CMMS is robust, secure, and offers pre-programmed analytics and built-in functionality and reporting. With cloud and mobile device interfaces, a facilities management system enables companies to monitor and automate work orders and tasks, generate accurate reporting, and instantly identify preventive maintenance requirements.

Integration with core business systems, IoT devices and on-premises sensors enables seamless collaboration across departments. This provides time and cost saving benefits while uncovering key metrics that help improve management in a fast-paced and logistically challenging environment.

An effective facilities management system is the cornerstone of workplace management that helps organizations achieve business objectives. By leveraging technology, companies are able to bridge the gaps in inefficient processes and unlock maximum facility management benefits that meet daily operational needs such as:

• Improve productivity of facilities and personnel
• Manage infrastructure and personnel risks
• Mitigate environmental impact and promote sustainable strategies
• Guarantee compliance and security
• Collect and analyze real estate, asset, and resources data
• Forecasting and business projections for key decision-making

Banking on BuildFolio

Companies can gain a competitive advantage by increasing overall efficiency and productivity in the workplace with SQL View’s BuildFolio CMMS system.

Aging infrastructures, budgeting problems, health and safety regulations, and increasing workloads are challenges that our CMMS is built to manage. And because every office and organization is different, we offer a customized, agile approach. Start with the features you need and let the system evolve in parallel with your organization’s growth and needs.

With our facility management consultants and user-friendly applications, implementation and adoption has minimal disruption on the team and operations. BuildFolio provides instant value for businesses to hit the ground running with improved control and coordination in the strategic management of all facilities.