This article was originally published on Nadine International.
Setting the Stage
As maintenance needs increase with a building’s age, building managers across the globe are surrounded by some difficult questions:
- Are inspections completed on time?
- Are critical items being included in the renewal?
- Can facility assessment data be maintained live?
- Can I generate custom reports?
- How quickly can I justify my capital budget requirements?
And the most important: is there a way where I can find answers to all these questions in one place?
While the facilities team may work on expecting the unexpected, other departments might not be as proactive. Building managers want to put an end to these worries. But how can they do that?
Paper trails make things harder. These simply bring in the inability to focus on big-picture issues, and no matter how much time and effort the teams put in, badly organized data can take a toll on the decision-making process.
The Solution
It’s time to toss your paper reports!
All of your facilities-related challenges can be solved with a state-of-the-art facility condition assessment (FCA) solution. This software enables you to manage your single and multisite building assessments, including criticality assessment, asset tracking, facility condition index, code consulting, funding optimization, work order fulfillment, preventive maintenance scheduling, reporting, and analytics.
Let’s see how:
1. Better Criticality Review
The facility assessment reports are generally extra lengthy and require a lot of deep digging to access the most critical information.
FCA software has the unique capability of providing its users a better and summarized building inspection report on the condition of the building, typically in one or two pages. The color-coded heat map makes it easier to visually understand and prioritize the maintenance or renewal needs. This also gives you an extra edge in terms of business case development, project justification, investment analysis reports, etc.
In short, there’s no more need to read lengthy reports. One map explains it all!
2. Optimized Funding across the assets
With several buildings and respective stakeholders in place, it becomes more difficult than ever to make the best use of available funds. There is a real lack of flexibility in optimizing future funding expenditures.
The FCA software applies advanced algorithms that help you justify your renewal needs, obtain funding, and maintain a balanced facility condition index (FCI) across all assets.
Furthermore, it gives you the capability to create unlimited funding scenarios for better decision-making in a scientific way. You can superimpose the scenarios that best meet your needs, prioritize your facilities based on the criticality, and build requirements that fit into your budget.
Funding optimization can’t be more simple than this!
3. Improved Asset Tracking and Management
Tracking the assets via spreadsheets and manual analysis can be extremely daunting and time-consuming, especially for a business with assets in various locations.
Automated facility condition assessment software (FCA) comes with the most important feature of managing and tracking different assets spread across various locations. On a basic level, this feature helps to track the progress of all the critical equipment across your buildings — their actual age, current health status, the due date for renewal, and much more. By doing this, you can benchmark and compare the condition of your assets in real time.
Applying technology gives you more flexibility over building management and asset handling of maintenance and contractual responsibilities.
4. Work Order Fulfillment
Being a facility manager, there are several occasions in the day in, day out of your schedule when you run to an office desktop to complete time-sensitive work orders. This might have left you wondering, “Will my life become much simpler if all this gets automated, simplified, and controlled?”
The answer, of course, is yes.
Work order tracking allows you to schedule and provide the team with a planned job to ensure smooth work without delays or interruptions. Work orders can be submitted and tracked easily, allowing you to quickly gauge the costs associated with repairs/renewals of your assets.
Also, with automatic email alerts, facility teams never miss out on a scheduled inspection or preventive maintenance. This allows them to take full control of their tasks and constantly make improvements.
Go beyond just managing the work!
5. Preventive Maintenance Scheduling
Downtime and failure rate of your equipment maintenance can be much higher than you would expect, especially if you work in a reactive or “firefighting” scenario.
The preventive maintenance feature of the FCA software allows you to streamline every aspect of your preventive maintenance program, including development, scheduling, and tracking. It enables you to generate meter-based PMs and set up PM schedules, which prevent any future failures and reduces the overall downtime.
So, Let’s Recap
No matter what industry your business belongs to, managing your critical assets and maintenance needs is requisite to keep your business running optimally. And this is only possible via the right planning and course of action. A facility condition assessment (FCA) software not only helps you prioritize your assets for maintenance renewals but also reduces the cost of your operations; all because of a data-driven and scientific approach.
After all, why not trust data over instincts?
