5 Ideas to Improve Your Facilities Management Process

Facilities management is the backbone of any organization, no matter the industry. When optimized, it can decrease downtime, create a stress-free work environment, and improve the company’s bottom line. Unfortunately, however, whenever a company must make budget cuts, FM is one of the first to experience the consequences.

New innovations within this space can help you do more than ever, but must be done properly in order to achieve true hard dollar savings.Here are five tips to improve your facilities management process and save money.

Work With an Integrated Facilities Management (IFM) Partner

Integrated Facilities Management is the future of FM. The right partner will work with you to universalize your operations, no matter how many locations you oversee. That means they’ll find dependable independent service providers to tackle maintenance, cleaning, and whatever other FM tasks you need to outsource in order for your internal team to focus on what matters most.

IFM should provide a better cost model, focusing on a holistic approach to FM: the right IFM partner will give your team the operational support and process improvements necessary to optimize operations instead of merely looking at hourly rates. For example, rather than hiring the contractor that offers the lowest hourly rate—which is typical of the traditional cost reduction model—the right IFM partner will find contractors who work efficiently, minimizing the hidden costs that come from redoing work orders, conducting costly emergency repairs, or even shelling out for costly overtime charges.

The right IFM partner will operate on an easy-to-use platform enabling:

Communication Between the C-Suite, FM Team, IFM Partner & Contractors
Custom KPI Tracking
Assigning & Tracking Work Orders
NPS Service Verification
Asset Management
Data Analysis of Work Orders & Daily Rounds
Real-Time Updates via Phone, Tablet, or Desktop
Overall Optimization of Your Processes

Define Your KPIs

You can’t improve your processes if you don’t know what you’re doing to begin with. To create a foundational understanding of what your FM processes look like, you need to define and track relevant KPIs. There are five core KPIs you should track when you switch to IFM:

Work Order Management
Financial Metrics
Preventive Maintenance Compliance
Asset Condition
Service Level Agreements

These five KPIs—along with any others that you and your IFM partner identify as pertinent to your FM operations—will give you an idea of how your team spends their time and what can be improved.

Analyze Data to Identify Patterns & Build Efficient Processes

Once you’ve been tracking your KPIs for a sufficient amount of time, you can start to look at what the data tell you about your processes. With the right IFM platform, your analytics will be updated in real time, so you’ll always be able to make timely decisions almost immediately.

Which areas have repeat or excessive issues?
Where are you spending an outsized amount of time and money?
Do you notice any areas where you spend more time on preventive maintenance? How do those fare when it comes to reactive maintenance? How much money, on average, are you spending to maintain those areas?

Prioritize Preventive Maintenance

Leveraging the data from your IFM platform, especially your Preventive Maintenance Compliance and Time Spent on Reactive Maintenance KPIs, will enable you to parse how your team and your contractors spend their time. Are they running around trying to put out fires, or are they able to calmly do daily rounds and make little fixes to equipment here and there?

When you analyze the data, then you can more easily pinpoint where to spend time on preventive maintenance—which will save your team money. After all, running equipment until it fails or breaks costs up to 10 times as much as regular maintenance, thanks to downtime, costly repairs, and shortened equipment lifespans.

Once you’ve prioritized preventive maintenance enough to get reactive maintenance under control, you can utilize your analytics program to analyze patterns and inform your team of what will happen, and avert costly downtime.

Automate Processes to Streamline Operations

Finally, with the right IFM platform, you can automate processes such as work order generation and task reminders to save time and prevent missed tasks. You can also rely on your IFM partner to verify service. This saves your team from the tedium of small, often overlooked tasks, so they can focus on what really matters.