Below we will go over two identified pillars; stakeholder connectivity and data analytics. By focusing on these two pillars, we will elaborate the features and tools that would be ideally required to improve facility management as a whole.
By strengthening stakeholder connectivity, as well as stakeholder engagement, facility managers can have a better connection with each participant in a multi-faceted manner. This kind of approach should allow each stakeholder to utilize an application, whether it be mobile or web, in order to communicate, manage and request specific information or requirements.
For vendors, this can entail something as simple as requesting maintenance, making payments or managing leasing contracts that are due for renewal. This would allow for a direct and seamless communication line that could better facilitate the needed services that happen between vendors and facility managers. Take maintenance requests, for example. Through such a platform, managers can receive notifications of requests with detailed descriptions and multimedia elements (photos, videos) sent by vendors to help managers prioritize and manage responses. Furthermore, these requests can be assigned and sent to technicians so that they can be better prepared and equipped with the appropriate tools or equipment.
Data is critical for understanding where facilities management processes and procedures stand.There are a number of reasons why facilities would want to collect in depth data. Many of these reasons directly attribute to confirming known inefficiencies, discovering new ones, or proving a hypothesis wrong/correct.
However, in order for this to be possible, facility owners would need to adopt or integrate a management system that collects transmitted data in a multifaceted way through various technology points. Such a system should allow for auto-generated reports, automated KPIs, and overall measurements of management tasks to help strategize forward-thinking decision making.
So, what could a potential use case look like? Take “work order response time” for example. By rigging technicians with a mobile application that is connected to a management system, records can be collected when technicians open their assigned task, mark start and complete times, document results, and receive feedback from vendors on quality of work. By time-stamping and collecting these data points, the system can automatically build a KPI report in an automated and transparent fashion for greater convenience. Although this is just one example, the same can be done for cost per repair, leasing contracts, payments, and much more.
