What is facility management software?
Facility management software helps businesses manage, control and oversee the running and maintenance of buildings, assets, as well as occupants in an efficient and effective manner. Facility management is a highly complex process as it combines the comfort and safety of people with the uninterrupted functionality of a place thr0ugh technology.
Facilities management software centralise all the information required by facility managers and help them with:
- Resource allocation
- Property management
- Setting up a smooth operational schedule
- Handle maintenance requests
- Make data-driven decisions
The list could go on forever as a proper facilities management solution can provide the answers to a lot of pain points faced by modern maintenance management companies. What we’ll do is go into more detail about the sort of help you should expect from these solutions.
What kind of help does facilities management software provide? Here are the key benefits
Computer-aided facility management can prove to be life-saving for daily operations. It provides a single digital environment, a centralized database to send and receive information so that technicians and facilities managers alike are on the same page.
Forget looking through folders, printed pieces of paper, or digging through email threads. Digitizing the entire facility management system ensures the safety that all information is safely stored and easily accessible.
Now, let’s dig a bit deeper into the benefits of facility management software and the value it can bring to your company.
Asset management, repair and maintenance
One of the main functions of facility management software is ensuring that assets work as they should, getting serviced ahead of time. The goal is to avoid breakdowns, asset downtime, malfunctions and failures that would interrupt the normal workflow.
The right solution makes it easy to schedule preventive maintenance, order new parts and materials, and track their status. Elevating enterprise asset management causes maintenance costs to drop significantly and productivity to rise noticeably.
Streamline ordering new parts
Ordering new parts and materials comes with a lot of asterisks – finding an approved and reliable supplier, ensuring they come with the right warranty documentation and that quality is always high. Computerized maintenance management software helps you streamline the ordering process by ticking all of these boxes at once.
Faster invoicing
In a competitive business environment where time is money, operational inefficiencies of any nature can prove to be detrimental. The right computerized maintenance management system allows the integration of third-party accounting systems, meaning that invoices can be submitted online, saving time and resources.
Asset tracking
An intelligent maintenance management platform enables visibility of all physical assets in multiple locations across the entire organization. By doing so, it ensures the correct and timely handling of equipment maintenance, service requests and maintaining a rigid asset upkeep schedule. Having the right solution, all repair and maintenance programs are synced avoiding misunderstandings about location, orders, inspections and asset conditions.
Manage contracts and documentation
The facility maintenance industry has a lot of back and forth between companies, technicians and contractors. This back and forth includes Request for Proposal (RFP) documentation and facility management systems help with the monitoring of the RFP statuses along the way. The software also aids with how quickly these contracts are accepted and signed.
Scheduled preventative maintenance
The entire facility management industry is based on a company’s ability to plan maintenance events and mandatory inspections. The best facilities management software can help you control costs and proactively schedule maintenance activities and improve overall operational efficiencies.
Which type of facility management software is best for me?
The facilities management software landscape has changed a lot in the past couple of years with several types of facilities maintenance software flooding the market today.
First off you have, CAFM software, which is short for Computer-Aided Facility Management and offers a more admin-focused suite of services such as tracking, management, planning, and reporting on physical space management and business locations.
CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management Software) is another type of facility management software that includes the same core offering as CAFM software with a more detailed package for maintenance scheduling and execution. CMMS software is more than an asset management solution – it’s geared towards preventive maintenance, ensuring you can track and manage the process from beginning to end.
Field service management software, is the latest, most modern rendition of what is known as facility management software. A diverse platform such as Frontu comes with features such as real-time task assessment, route planning and navigation, time and location tracking and more, boosts your team’s performance, improves customer service and overall operations. The best facility management software platform is the one that does a lot more than keep you in line with maintenance jobs.
