Does Your Facilities Program Ease Your Pain?

If you’re responsible for managing a number of locations, whether stores, restaurants, buildings or other types of facilities, is everything running smoothly or are you facing a boatload of problems every day?  Too many facilities professionals spend their day pulling their hair out, grappling with a seemingly never ending series of problems, challenges and pains.  And without a FM-focused technology platform that offers true transparency, your world’s likely not getting better any time soon.

Our team has worked with hundreds of companies, from those managing a small number of facilities to global brands with thousands of locations.  Its goal, simply, is to “ease their pain.”  Here are a number of the pain points our team eases across our customer base on an on-going basis.  How many of these issues are you facing?

9 Common Facilities Management Pain Points

1. Growing too fast: Existing, often manual, processes can’t handle growth in the number of stores, work orders, contractors, and increasing service level requirements.
2. Unhappy with current systems: Existing, older technology can’t support the wider array of requirements that need to be delivered.
3. Unwieldy approval process: Too many companies have no standard way for approving facilities spending, resulting in inefficiencies, overspending and lack of visibility.
4. Complex systems: With in-house or some large-scale systems, FMs often can’t take full ownership of their platform and are forced to rely on their provider for system management and even daily operations.
5. Vendor compliance & trust: Most companies work with hundreds if not thousands of third party contractors but have no way of ensuring each one is in compliance with all applicable insurance, certifications and other standards, opening themselves up to all kinds of risk and liabilities.
6. Overreliance on call center: Facilities departments can find themselves relying on outsourcers and other third parties that aren’t familiar with their business and thus they’re unable to rapidly respond to service issues and resolve them promptly and cost-effectively.
7. Lack of visibility: Service requests from preventive maintenance to emergency repairs are happening continually but there’s typically little to no visibility of the work that’s actually being performed within their locations.
8. Limited contractor sourcing: Numerous FMs are unhappy with some of their current vendors and want the ability to choose who will be servicing what issues and and at what prices.
9. Poor contractor performance: Without a way to objectively measure those doing the work, there are too many cases where work is paid for that was poorly performed and/or the issue was not necessarily resolved.

Removing the Blinders from your Facilities Management Program

How many of these sound familiar?  If you’re not working with a modern, service automation platform, it’s likely you’re experiencing a number of these pain points above.  What’s the common thread?  Basically, it’s not having enough – or any – control and visibility across the day-to-day operations.  Knowing (more of) what’s going on will actually free you from being in a reactive mode.

Ultimately, resolving most facilities management challenges comes down to increasing transparency.  Today, easy-to-use, cloud-based FM technologies provide that window into the work done at your locations by your contractors.  With such platforms, backed by powerful ‘big data’ analytics and business intelligence tools, service levels can be improved while repair & maintenance costs are reduced, all without additional infrastructure investment.