Why is accurate reporting important for K12 School Facility Planning?
Accurate reporting is essential for K12 facilities management and capital planning. How K12 Facility Planners present and report this data is often the key is getting essential school maintenance and improvement projects approved by the school board.
In K12 facility management, a variety of tools and systems are used every day including, physical equipment to perform manual repairs and data systems that are essential to the operation of your facilities and physical assets. Managing a school facility is a process that involves using the right tools at the right time in order to achieve optimal results.
The single most important tool for success in K12 school facility planning is your reporting system. Data collection, management, and storage are integral to the facility management industry. Here we discuss the top 3 reasons why accurate reporting is so important for K12 School Facility Planning.
1. Maximize Productivity and Efficiency
Maximizing the operational output of facilities while simultaneously minimizing costs is a constant balancing act for the k12 facility team. Implementing a facility management system that incorporates real-time reporting and offers data visualization is highly beneficial.
In order to understand just how efficient your maintenance practices are, it is essential to accurately measure your team's completed work orders against the total number of work orders filed. This simple data set will illuminate whether your K12 maintenance operations are effective or if your team is stalled with too much backlog.
Learn how to improve your preventive maintenance program.
The FOUNDATION Solution will quickly reveal how repairs are being carried out. This is an easy way to manage downtime and improve productivity. Data collected using facilities management software is key for swiftly identifying potential operational weaknesses and fixing them before they become a problem.
2. Get Projects Funded
K12 facility managers depend on school district administrators and finance departments to determine operations budgets and future capital expenditures. This means that every K12 facility manager needs to be an expert at extracting useful operations data to demonstrate efficiency.
Establishing the right metrics and explaining capital projects using the right financial analysis terms is critical to ensuring your projects get funded and approved. Without the right financial models, it can be difficult to accurately explain to financial stakeholders why certain projects need to be funded.
Learn more about asset management and capital planning with Intellis.
In order to successfully sell your capital improvement project, it is essential to present a compelling business case backed by intelligent data. It's crucial for facility managers to understand not just the hands-on aspects of operations, but also the financial underpinning.
Read the guide on Financial Analysis for Facility Managers.
A facility management system with robust data collection capabilities will help to demonstrate the facility's return on investment, return on assets and return on equity – all of which are affected by how you run your building.
With a facilities management system like FOUNDATION.Plans, it is easy to convert your vision into operational objectives and to link your capital project plan to individual performance, 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 1 year
- Childhood: 1–16 years
- Adolescence: 17–29 years
- Adulthood: 30–49 years
- Old Age: 50-plus years
It is vital that K12 facility planners know when repair and maintenance issues will begin within each of these phases. It is possible to greatly improve the efficacy of your capital planning through collecting data on equipment life cycle, repair schedules, against industry standards and benchmarks.
All of these factors can influence when you'll need to have capital saved for a major renovation or replacement. This will make the planning process much smoother and help your department keep to a schedule.
Data is key in helping K12 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, which has the capability to 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 K12 facility managers in many ways, including managing work process flows, tracking physical assets, and supervising building facilities. Mobile tech helps facilities managers to communicate, collaborate, and manage workloads more efficiently.
Interested in learning how Intellis software can improve K12 School Facility Planning?
