Smart Facility Management and the 5 Best Maintenance Management Practices

How to get the best out of the adopted digital solution for facility management and, even more important, where to start from?

When in doubt, the best choice should be too look around and find out what other successful facility management company have done and how they have been implementing a progressive digitalisation of their daily work. Searching for “Test-Try-Succeed” case studies will help all readers in understanding the initial challenges and define a digital adoption roadmap that will transform a journey-in-the-unknown into a well-planned walk-in-the-park.

“Digital solutions for facility management are digitalising manual processes, automating scheduling and allowing centralised control of all operations. A complete control of the full workflow related to preventive and incidental maintenance of facilities and equipment is part and parcel of the digitalisation process and one of the sources of highest ROI”

Best practices are commercial or professional procedures that are accepted or prescribed as being correct or most effective based on practical experience. Evaluating and applying them will reduce enormously the risks of unpleasant surprises or, even worst, failures. We have been studying and analysing for you the best practices when it comes to facility management, and the following are our best 5 takes.

1. Asset Maintenance Management and Data

One of the first big gains, a facility management company has when adopting a digital solution, is easy data collection from all the departments and equipment. The facility manager, reading and analysing these data will be able to define historical series and recurrences transforming the preventive maintenance function in his facility management in a proactive and cost saving “predictive” exercise.

Definition of operational benchmarks will allow our facility manager to foresee and prevent breakdowns or failures, assess costs accurately, focus on warranty issues and claims, manage the inventory of spare parts wisely and lower your operating costs while manage service provision confidently.

2. Budget Control, Data and Positive Financial Impacts

Data collection and analysis doesn’t stop at foreseeing needed maintenance for your equipment. Another great impact comes from the use of the gathered data to segregate each piece of equipment according to its “issues history”. With these data available it will be easy to define, not only the schedule for preventive maintenance but also request budget for asset replacement, define the best brands in terms of maintenance cost and power consumption and, in few words, reduce both your Capex and Opex via a more efficient assets’ management. In other words the facility management will raise enormously its efficiency and easily calculate the ROI on the “digital investment”.

3. Human Resources Management

Digitalisation of facility management should be integrated with IoT, Sensor Technology and a communication/verification tool. In this way the facility manager, and the interested department, will already know the cause of the issue, which parts might be needed and how long it will take to resolve it.

Main equipment will directly “communicate” with the control room signalling the issue or the tenants will send a message to the facility management team with attached a picture and short explanation of the issue allowing immediate allocation of the right team to resolve it. Outcome of all this will be a better management of human resources and a much improved tenants’ and users’ experience which, in the long term could be translated into higher rental fees.

4. Centralised and Multiple Level Dashboards: The Picture that Says a Thousand Words

A Facility manager as well as the various team leaders, according to their responsibilities,  should be able to oversee the entire operation in a centralised way by using dashboards.

This will give an “eagle-eye” view of the facility management performance and enable checking that everything within the building runs smoothly and with no surprises in the making. With cloud based digitalised solutions it would be even better as the monitoring, of building, equipment and people could be done from anywhere and at any time.  

5. IoT, Sensor Technology and QR Coding: Troubleshooting Made Easy

Once all the equipment, or at least the most essential, in a building have been audited and their data, such as manufacturer ratings as well as actual energy consumption, repair history and many other metrics, have been digitally stored, technicians and facility managers will always be able to have all the details available.

Understand the performance of each asset in detail and conduct better correlation and analysis while troubleshooting issues more easily is the result of this and the best tool to achieve it is integrate IoT in your smart facility management. The future is going to be all about predictive more than preventive maintenance! A while ago we have published an interesting article on IoT and its possible ESG impact, read it here for better understanding of the unlimited possibilities of IoT integration!

As mentioned in the quote at the beginning of this article, facility management digitalisation eliminates all the time-costing manual procedures, recording and storing while ensures a very high reliability of all information by eliminating the “human error” factor.

Data collection, which manually happens only within given timeframes, digitally is a continuous process that increases enormously the predictability and a 24/7 monitoring of environment, equipment, and threats.

ServeDeck team is available for a free demo and site visit to suggest the best combination within the wide range of offered solutions for your specific facility management needs. Your digital future is just a phone call away, get in touch with us!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The opinions expressed in this article are solely of the author, Dr Daniele Gambero.

Dr Gambero has been an expatriate to Malaysia from Italy, since 1998 and has more than 35 years of real estate experience. He is the co-founder and group CEO of REI Group of Companies, the Co-founder of Propenomy.com and the deputy president of the Malaysia Proptech Association.

In the past 10 years Daniele, as international and TEDX speaker, has engaged several hundreds thousand people talking about Property, Economy, Propenomy, Digital Marketing and Motivation. He is also a bestselling author and columnist on several magazines and main stream media. You can reach him directly through his LinkedIn page here