Why is accurate reporting necessary for facilities management?
Accurate reporting is essential for facilities management and capital planning because it is the most precise way to define the next steps regarding procuring financial, programmatic, and staff resources. Equally important is the practice facility managers present this data.
The essential tool for your organization's success is your reporting system. Data collection, management, and storage are integral to the facility management industry. Here we discuss why accurate reporting is so essential.
Now let's dig into the top 3 reasons precise reporting is vital for facility management.
1. Accurate Reporting Maximizes 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. Therefore, a facility management system that incorporates real-time reporting and offers data visualization is highly beneficial.
To understand how efficient your maintenance practices are, you need 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 adequate or if your team is stalled with too much backlog.
Learn how to improve your preventive maintenance program.
It can also reveal how quickly these repairs are completed, which is an easy way to manage downtime and improves productivity. Data collected using facilities management software is critical for swiftly identifying potential operational weaknesses and fixing them well before they become a problem.
2. Accurate Reporting Gets Projects Funded
Facility managers generally depend on building administrators and finance departments to determine operations budgets and future capital expenditures. Therefore, 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. Without suitable economic models, it can be difficult to accurately explain to financial stakeholders why specific tasks need to be financed.
Learn more about asset management and capital planning with Intellis.
To successfully sell your capital improvement project, presenting a compelling business case backed by intelligent data is essential. 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, return on assets, and equity, all 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, and strategic planning, while highlighting the outcomes for ongoing improvement.
3. Accurate Reporting Makes Planning for the Future A Lot Easier
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 need to know when more extensive repair and maintenance issues will begin within each phase. It is possible to significantly improve the efficacy of your capital planning through collecting data on equipment life cycle and repair schedules against industry standards and benchmarks.
In this way, 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, 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.
When producing a report, it is not enough to present the information; it is essential to engage your audience and tell a compelling story about what your team plans to achieve.
Read our comprehensive guide to getting projects funded.
As a facility manager, you use various tools and systems every day, including physical equipment, to perform manual repairs and data systems essential to your facilities and physical assets. Managing a facility is a process that involves using the right tools at the right time to achieve optimal results.
Talk to us directly to learn why Intellis is the right tool for your next facility management project.
