Benefits of a facility management system

Computer software or systems can be helpful tools for companies to get ahead of competitors. Practical software designs followed by intensive User Acceptance Test (UAT) results in systems that can reliably and accurately complete everyday mundane tasks for us. They can also crunch massive data sets to find patterns that yield fresh insights into optimising our work.

The same goes in the domain of facility management which has been employing software called facility management systems to run & track everyday maintenance activities. Facility management systems are also able to process data collected to churn out insights for property owners to make improvements to day to day tasks.

Facility management software in action:

1. You can create concise work orders conveniently via desktop or mobile app. The digital work order forms will contain all the necessary fields. It will utilise drop-downs whenever possible to ensure uniformity in inputs. The digital forms can also quey databases within the system in real-time to assist in populating dropdown options or to autocomplete fields.
2. You can manually choose to assign the work order to specific field personnel or let the system assign based on pre-set considerations such as availability, time of the last activation, area of specialisation, rate of success, geographic proximity to location etc.
3. The field personnel assigned to the task will be notified via his/her mobile device. The personnel and will have to acknowledge the notification and proceed to the location to carry out the maintenance needed.
4. If there is no acknowledgement, the app will continue to prompt, and if the work order is labelled as a critical one, the app will activate another field personnel for the job. You will be notified of the absentee situation.
5. Once on-site, the activated personnel can notify the system that he/she has arrived and work is underway.
6. On-site, the field personnel can access information about the asset and even look into historical records associated with the asset. Information at fingertips will quicken the diagnostic and help to solve the issue faster. Information such as:
   1. When was the asset last serviced?
   2. When did it last break down?
   3. How was it resolved in the past?
   4. Who fixed it and more.
7. Once the work is completed, the field personnel can use the facility management app to take a picture of the finished work and upload to the system. At this point, you will also be notified of the job done.
8. All the actions reported and the intervals between each action are captured to form data such as response time of contractor, length of time taken to resolve issues, how often specific issues arose and more.
9. Custom dashboards can be set up to display key matric that users need. E.g. Average response time, the average time taken to resolve issues, the category which triggered the most activation etc.
10. Tenants and clients can also effortlessly create work orders and activate field personnel via the facility management app. The user interface is clean and intuitive. Tooltip pop-ups are sprinkled around the form to give clarity to the user. The app will have a few concise but critical questions for the tenants to answer before automatically dispatching the best personnel for the job — information such as exact location, type of problem, level of criticality etc. Tenants are also able to take pictures to convey the situation better and for record-keeping purpose. Without the need for a supervisor to assign field personnel, the response time of deploying someone on site is shortened, providing a higher service level for the tenant.
11. Keep everyone on the same page with WhatsApp style communication within the facility management software. Group chats and private conversations are available, so you do not need to repeat yourself to multiple stakeholders. Group chats also allow everyone to know the progress of the different streams and stay on the same page. All conversions are captured and stored as records.
12. Workshift management within the facility management software help keep stakeholders committed to the plan. Email followups will remind stakeholders to take action when it visits their shift.