What Facilities Managers Need to Know: Repair & Maintenance & Weather

This is the next in a series of posts highlighting the 13 trends, technologies and best practices essential for facilities managers and other professionals, from the ebook What You Need to Know to Succeed in Facilities Management in 2020.

Facilities expenses can often fluctuate day-to-day or week-to-week, causing unforeseen problems due to budget overruns or simply unprepared locations.  How?  A prolonged heat wave drives up HVAC costs or worse, overtaxed equipment then fails, driving traffic away and harming sales. Or a winter storm catches a region off guard without enough sand or salt, or priority plowing services, and a store can’t open.

But what if there were a way to see what’s coming – and prepare accordingly – by seeing what’s happening at your other stores, and identifying historical spend patterns across your locations?

Keeping Cool with Weather Data and Facilities Management Software

Smart users of FM systems will be able to not only simply track weather but be able to act based on its likely impact.  With smart use of historical facilities spend data, trend analysis, weather records and real-time expense capture, FMs will be able to know:

• what happened in specific locations and regions with similar weather before
• what’s happening with other locations ‘upstream’ that will likely impact them

Let’s say you know a heat wave is spreading from region to region across your coverage area.  With both facilities and weather data integrated, you can discover that in previous scenarios you had A/C compressor problems, and make sure to preemptively perform maintenance services.  

You can also make sure that funds are budgeted, potentially needed parts are available and service techs are ready based on what weather is occurring elsewhere.  Knowing the problems you faced in the past will enable you to ensure you do your best to avoid such problems going forward.