Imagine you’re managing facilities at a bustling hospital when a crucial piece of equipment breaks down. This will disrupt patient care – which could have bad consequences.
This scenario highlights facility managers’ challenge: making quick decisions to keep operations smooth while minimizing downtime and costs.
A simple way to avoid this challenge would have been to keep track of equipment health to predict potential breakdowns. Field service management software does exactly this – and more.
Key Takeaways
- Data-driven facility management enables more informed decision making by leveraging real-time data and analytics to optimize operations, reduce costs, and improve the occupant experience.
- Facility management software centralizes data from various sources like IoT sensors, work order systems, and space utilization tools to provide a comprehensive view of facility performance.
- Analyzing trends and patterns in historical facility data helps predict maintenance needs, identify inefficiencies, and make strategic decisions about space usage and resource allocation.
- Automating workflows based on real-time data, such as triggering maintenance when equipment sensors detect issues, improves response times and prevents costly failures.
- Data visualization tools like dashboards and reports make it easier for facility managers to spot trends, benchmark performance, and communicate insights to stakeholders.
How FSM software makes your facility more data-driven in its operations
Field service management software helps you automate and streamline many workflows – majorly in these five key areas:
1. Centrally manage data
You can centrally store and analyze data in real-time using FSM software with cloud-storage capabilities. This includes asset information, maintenance records, work orders, and equipment performance metrics. Doing so gives your managers visibility into on-ground operations. This further enables them to make quick decisions based on real-time information.
2. Performance benchmarking
When you track data across operational, financial, workforce, equipment health, and more — you can compare it with industry benchmarks to align overall performance. You do this by using this data to calculate performance metrics like maintenance costs, downtime, energy efficiency, and industry benchmarks. AI-enabled FSM tools also provide insights on how you can improve for better results. This data-driven approach ensures continuous improvement and helps facilities stay competitive in a rapidly changing environment.
3. Optimize resource allocation using data
By tracking data on how much resources get used for different operational tasks, market demand for your services, and workforce productivity – you can optimize your resources to save on facility costs and the workforce’s productive time.
Whether it’s scheduling preventive maintenance tasks, assigning work orders to technicians, or optimizing spare parts inventory, managers can make data-driven decisions that maximize efficiency and minimize costs.
4. Capital planning and budgeting
FSM software with features for financial reporting and analysis presents a great opportunity to handle cash flow using historical data and market trends. It helps with asset lifecycle management, forecasting maintenance and replacement costs, and prioritizing capital projects for further growth. You can also generate projections which will help you plan for any potential breakdowns or tap into market opportunities. Overall, FSM software will help you prioritize investment decisions and optimize long-term asset performance for your facility – which is crucial for profitability.
5. Calibrate equipment to meet compliance
Using equipment data and manufacturer’s recommended calibration, FSM software can ensure that critical equipment meets regulatory standards and performance requirements. It can also automatically schedule any calibration and maintenance tasks, track records, and generate reports for checks. Adopting FSM software ensures that equipment operates at optimal performance levels and reduces the risk of non-compliance issues.
5 key analytics workflows you can run using FSM software for facility management
- Cost analysis and budgeting: helps track your expenses, revenues, payables, vendor invoices, and more to give insights on how well your facility maintains its cashflows.
- Space utilization analytics: helps track space utilization metrics to optimize facility layout and usage. You can reduce waste of space and improve productivity with the right placement of resources or equipment.
- Asset performance analytics: helps gain insights into asset performance metrics such as uptime, mean time to failure (MTTF), or mean time to repair (MTTR). You can identify trends and optimize maintenance strategies.
- Root cause analysis: FSM software can help conduct root cause analysis on equipment failures or maintenance issues. It helps identify underlying issues and strategize to prevent recurrence in the future via predictive maintenance.
- Determine energy usage: an often neglected feature important in today’s times is to calculate energy consumption and get insights on how to save it. This helps in adhering to compliance and environmental regulations relevant to local laws.
FSM software with predictive analytics features usually has the above. But you can also opt to choose software with integration capabilities to analyze data using more specialized tools.
Zuper can help your facility make data-driven operational decisions
Zuper is a field service management software enabled with the latest technologies like artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, generative AI, and more. You can integrate Zuper into your regular operational workflows to improve them using historical data and industry benchmarks – book a demo to learn more.
Essential Industry Insights for Further Reading
- The Power of Data-Driven Facility Management: This article from the International Facility Management Association explores how data analytics is transforming facility management practices and improving decision-making.
- How to Use IoT Data to Optimize Facility Management: Facilities Net provides insights on leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) data to enhance facility management operations, reduce costs, and improve occupant experiences.
- The Future of Facilities Management: McKinsey & Company shares their perspective on the future of facilities management, highlighting the role of data-driven strategies and digital technologies in driving innovation and efficiency.