Why is accurate reporting so important for facility capital planning?
Having precise data in facilities management and capital plan reporting is crucial. But equally important is how facility managers present this information.
As a facility manager, you use various tools and systems daily, including physical equipment, to perform manual repairs and data systems essential to operating your facilities and physical assets. Effectively managing a facility requires utilizing appropriate tools at the proper time to attain the best possible outcomes.
When producing a report, more than merely presenting the information is needed. Instead, engagingential to engage the audience and convey a compelling story about what has been achieved and what your team plans to achieve in the future.
Accurate reporting is also a means of defining the following steps and the required steps to get there. This is especially important when the next steps involve procuring financial, programmatic, and staff resources.
Nevertheless, your reporting system is the most important tool for your organization's success. Data collection, management, and storage are integral to the facility management industry. Here we discuss why accurate reporting is so important.
1. Maximize Productivity and Efficiency
Maximizing the operational output of your facilities and physical assets while simultaneously minimizing operating and capital costs is the primary balancing act for the facility team. To achieve this, a facility management system that incorporates real-time reporting and offers data visualization is highly beneficial.
To understand how efficient your maintenance practices are, it is possible to measure your team's completed work orders against the total number of work orders filed. This simple data set will illuminate whether your maintenance operations are effective or your team needs more backlog.
You can learn how to improve your preventive maintenance program.
It can also reveal how quickly these repairs are being carried out. This is an easy way to manage downtime and improve productivity. Data collected using facilities management software is critical for swiftly identifying potential operational weaknesses and fixing them well before they become problematic.
2. Get Your Projects Funded
Facility managers depend on building administrators and finance departments to determine operations budgets or future capital expenditures. This means that every facility manager should become an expert at extracting functional operations data and using it to demonstrate efficiency.
Establishing the right metrics and explaining your capital projects using the correct financial analysis terms is critical to ensuring your projects get funded and approved. With suitable economic models, it can be easier to accurately explain why specific tasks need to be financed to financial stakeholders.
You can learn more about asset management and capital planning with Intellis.
To successfully sell your capital improvement project, it is essential to present a compelling business case backed by intelligent data. In addition, facility managers must understand the hands-on aspects of operations and the financial underpinning.
A facility management system with robust data collection capabilities will help you demonstrate your facility's return on investment (ROI), physical assets, and equity – all affected by how you run your building.
With a facilities management system like FOUNDATION. It is easy to convert your vision into operational objectives and link your capital project plan to individual performance and strategic planning while highlighting the outcomes for ongoing improvement.
3. Future-Proof With Data Analytics
Buildings and infrastructure begin to deteriorate as soon as they come into use. As buildings age, they go through a process of deterioration, which can be categorized into five life-cycle stages that correlate to asset renewal:
- Prenatal: less than one year
- Childhood: 1–16 years
- Adolescence: 17–29 years
- Adulthood: 30–49 years
- Old Age: 50-plus years
Facility managers must know when more extensive repair and maintenance issues will begin each phase. It is possible to significantly improve the efficacy of your capital planning by collecting data on equipment life cycle and repair schedules against industry standards and benchmarks.
All these factors can influence when you need money saved up for a significant renovation or replacement. This will make the planning process much smoother and help your department keep to a schedule.
Data is critical in helping facility managers determine the best approach to motivating supervisors and technicians to stay on track with a high-functioning preventative maintenance program.
One of the best features of FOUNDATION is that it is a cloud-based data collection system that can update physical asset information in real-time or even on the go.
Please read our guide to mobile technology for facility managers.
Mobile data-collection technology empowers facility managers in many ways, including managing work process flows, tracking physical assets, and supervising building facilities. In addition, mobile tech helps facilities managers to communicate, collaborate, and manage workloads more efficiently.
Ready to learn more?
Schedule a demo to learn how Intellis software improves facility capital planning today!
