Effective facility management is essential to industrial and commercial enterprises everywhere. Discover insights and learn about best practices in facility management to help your operation run more seamlessly.
Explore ways your organization can maximize cost savings and experience ongoing satisfaction by implementing sound facilities management processes.
Facility management is the practice of overseeing the operations, physical assets, and infrastructure of a building or facility. This role encompasses a wide range of activities aimed at ensuring that a facility or building operates efficiently and effectively.
The primary goal of facility management is to maintain a safe, comfortable, and productive environment for staff and occupants.
Here, we dive into best practices in facility management to help your operation run more seamlessly, maximize cost savings, and experience ongoing satisfaction.
Download our free Facility Management Checklist to streamline maintenance, improve space utilization, and stay on top of compliance.
Whether it's for a manufacturing plant or a commercial real estate venture, a quality facilities management plan incorporates many moving parts. Maintaining a building — and often the accompanying property — requires planning, effort, and coordination. Facilities managers and their staff typically oversee responsibilities such as:
These duties encompass the oversight of relationships with external custodial services, contractors, suppliers, and other providers who contribute to the maintenance and operation of the facility.
These responsibilities include the planning and budget management for facility-related expenses, including maintenance, renovations, and upgrades.
It's often the facility management team's responsibility to help develop and implement emergency planning for various scenarios, including natural disasters, fires, and severe weather events.
Facilities managers and their teams are often required to become proficient in platforms such as computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS), building automation systems (BAS), and other software that allows businesses to streamline facility management processes.
Facility management services often work to promote sustainability and reduce an organization's carbon footprint. Services such as waste management, recycling programs, and energy-efficient technologies are an integral part of a smart facility management strategy.
Effective facilities management plays a critical role in creating a safe and functional environment for occupants and visitors in all industries. Proper oversight helps maintain efficiency and minimize costs, as well as ensure regulatory compliance and occupant satisfaction.
These are a few of the benefits that good facilities management can provide to organizations:
Regular preventive maintenance and inspections help keep facilities in proper shape, providing a pleasant environment to occupants and visitors.
Designing and organizing interior spaces maximizes their usability. Good space management enhances conditions such as employee workflow and occupant comfort.
Good facilities managers help ensure the security of occupants, investing in such items as access controls and surveillance systems.
Effective facility management enhances occupant health and safety by implementing emergency response plans and complying with fire safety regulations and meeting industrial safety standards.
A quality facility manager prioritizes the well-being of occupants. Staff and visitors enjoy the benefits through elements such as natural lighting, ergonomic furniture, and good indoor air quality.
Facilities management typically involves effective energy management, which reduces energy consumption costs to the organization and bolsters sustainability efforts.
Facility management is a versatile discipline that can benefit a wide range of industries. If an enterprise relies on facilities, equipment, and infrastructure, effective facilities management provides significant advantages.
Here are a few examples of industries that can benefit from a robust facilities management plan:
Facility management is crucial for retail and office space property owners and managers, ensuring that buildings are well-maintained, sufficiently secure, and provide a comfortable environment for tenants and visitors.
Property management companies and landlords often take advantage of facility management services to maintain rental properties and provide a pleasant living experience for tenants.
Many manufacturing plants have an in-house facilities management department to ensure that manufacturing processes aren't disrupted due to equipment failures or maintenance issues.
Schools, colleges, and universities incorporate facilities management practices to oversee classroom, common-area, and grounds upkeep to provide an environment conducive to learning for everyone.
Corporate data centers and other high-tech facilities require precise temperature control and critical infrastructure maintenance to ensure uninterrupted operations.
Hotels, resorts, and entertainment facilities benefit from facility management to provide guests with a comfortable and pleasant experience. Proper maintenance of rooms, amenities, and common areas drives customer satisfaction and encourages them to return for future visits.
Financial organizations often outsource to a third-party facilities management department, which helps maintain secure and operational banking locations and administrative offices.
Agricultural facilities and food processing plants must ensure the quality and safety of products. They rely on good facilities management for equipment, storage, and processing area upkeep to meet their goals.
Hospitals, clinics, and other organizations devoted to healthcare require thorough facilities management to maintain a sanitary and healthy environment by instituting proper cleaning protocols and seeing to the upkeep of regulation-level internal systems, such as specialized HVAC filtration units.
Facilities management concepts can be applied to a wide variety of industries. While facilities management technology and practices offer uniform advantages to every industry, each receives its own specific benefits from a thorough facility management plan.
A strong facilities maintenance program offers everything from improved operational efficiency and reduced energy costs to regulatory compliance and a productive environment for everyone in any industry that relies on physical facilities.
Dismissing the importance of proper facilities management can have a far-reaching impact. From equipment failure to safety issues to higher maintenance costs, there are numerous issues you can avoid by implementing a strong management plan, combined with powerful facilities maintenance software.
These are some common issues organizations with weak facilities maintenance practices may encounter:
Cutting corners can lead to diminished asset lifecycles and equipment that frequently breaks down.
Insufficient facilities management can lead to deferred asset maintenance, often resulting in higher upkeep and repair costs due to greater equipment wear and tear.
System and equipment failures in manufacturing plants due to poor facilities management can increase unplanned downtime and lead to higher production costs.
Without proper facilities maintenance, a company runs the risk of not complying with industry standards and safety regulations, potentially leading to fines, legal action, and possible disaster-mitigation measures.
Platforms such as Accruent’s asset management software systems simplify a wide variety of complex and time-consuming tasks to empower managers to focus their efforts on more critical duties.
Utilizing the best facility management software solutions available takes much of the minutia and tedium out of the hands of facility managers and frees them up to take care of more critical business. As a CMMS platform, Maintenance Connection streamlines maintenance operations with powerful analytics, asset tracking, and recordkeeping tools.
Our top-rated platform provides centralized maintenance management processes, meeting industry standards, and informing data-driven decisions for better facility performance. This approach to facility management can help you minimize downtime, extend equipment lifespan, and boost facility operation.
Maintenance Connection' features include:
The platform offers flexible access points, allowing teams to manage tasks from desktop web, mobile devices, and tablets.
It also integrates with industry-leading systems such as Accruent Meridian, Accruent Observe, IBM Maximo, and SAP, enabling seamless operations across your enterprise ecosystem.
Towson University in Maryland had 5,000 students in residential buildings, ranging from apartments to high-rise dorms, each with its own set of aging and diverse assets. As maintenance issues grew, and their in-house system couldn’t keep up. Work orders couldn’t be properly routed or tracked, and students had no way to see the status of their requests.
Towson University implements Maintenance Connection with the following features:
And results are:
Read more about Towson University’s success with Maintenance Connection
Masters Gallery Foods is a leading national cheese supplier with one of the largest privately held cheese inventories in the United States. The company wanted to engage in asset maintenance proactively, gain a transparent view into the metrics to help attain organizational goals, and automate day-to-day maintenance tasks.
Masters Gallery Foods selects Maintenance Connection as its new CMMS, and here are what they get:
Using Maintenance Connection, Masters Gallery Foods has focused on decreasing unplanned maintenance. With 2,000+ preventive maintenance schedules, the company has achieved an 85% planned maintenance to 15% unplanned maintenance split.
Read more about Masters Gallery Foods’s success with Maintenance Connection
The New York Times has 64 newspaper print sites across the world, with its main printing headquarters in College Point, New York. This single printing plant alone is home to approximately 10,000 assets. The New York Times struggled to find a way to organize its assets and track the health of equipment plant-wide. With thousands of employees spread out across the plant, the facility needed a way to report on equipment downtime, work order status, and schedule updates.
The New York Times implemented Maintenance Connection at College Point facility and here are the results:
Read more about The New York Times' success with Maintenance Connection
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