Why are Facilities Condition Assessments Important?
It is critical to know the extent to which the buildings, physical assets, and systems in your care are performing. Having comprehensive data on all assets enables Facility Managers to identify potential opportunities for facility optimization.
Previously, we've spoken about the importance of Facility Condition Assessments (FCA) for Healthcare organizations, but let's discuss some universal benefits for all types of facilities. Here we discuss how FCAs can improve your organization's operational efficiency and make your job easier.
What is a Facility Condition Assessment?
Facility Condition Assessment or FCA enables facility managers to understand how well facilities are equipped to meet the organization's needs this year, the following year, and five years from now. In terms of best practice, it is essential to standardize the FCA process. It remains the most helpful tool for assessing the useful life of an organization's equipment.
Facility Condition Assessment Data benefits your organization:
- Plan for future expenditures
- Predict the useful of equipment and physical assets
- Develop a strategic preventive maintenance program
Why are Facility Condition Assessments critical?
Facility Condition Assessments are essential because they determine the extent to which a facility can meet the intended purpose. Essentially, an FCA is a risk analysis for physical resources and assets.
Discover how FOUNDATION makes it easy to perform facility condition assessments.
The FCA evaluates the current condition of facilities. It determines the probability of physical assets running into issues. FCAs identify the keys to the operation and support structure and decide what will likely be or probably to be an issue and when.
This data gives executives a 360-degree view of the status of existing assets across all facilities. FCA data is a valuable tool for long-range planning. It enables executives to make decisions based on comprehensive reports and provides a strategic framework for planning future improvements.
What is the FCA process?
The Facility Condition Assessment begins with comprehensive facility equipment and related infrastructure inventory. Essentially, this is a list of all equipment and systems. In addition, it includes demographic information to help you identify each asset uniquely, such as age, location, and capacity.
A good start is by defining your organization's mission and aligning the facility's goals to the organization. Next, consider how the condition of equipment impacts the facility's ability to meet the organization's overall needs.
The results of condition assessments are added to this list as they are completed. Taking the time to develop and maintain this registry is essential because it helps to identify what kind of preventive programs your team should employ.
What do you do with FCA data?
Data from the FCA demonstrates the current operational state of the facility and its ability to meet defined needs. This allows the facility management team to develop a maintenance program specifically for the facility.
Conducting a Facility Condition Assessment for every piece of equipment will give you a clear understanding of the facilities' health and physical assets. Further, It enables facility managers to determine where to target investments, directly feeding into strategic facility capital planning.
Learn more about strategic facility planning with Intellis.
Data from facility assessments support everyday decision-making backed by real-time information and insights. Facility management platforms, like The FOUNDATION Solution, are designed to process the large amount of data collected during a facility assessment and package it into a digestible, simplified, mobile-friendly report that enables you and your management team to make decisions on the fly quickly.
For example, FOUNDATION offers a dynamic condition model of the organization's entire physical asset portfolio. This condition model enables facility managers to prioritize and categorize assessment data and integrate it directly into maintenance, capital project, and budgetary planning.
The FOUNDATION Solution takes this one step further with its mobile component, which allows your team to stay connected inside and outside the office.
Discover the benefits of mobile technology for strategic facility planning.
Our mobile-enabled platform provides project overviews, analyses, building biographies, and deficiency condition reports. Furthermore, you can upload photos into the platform directly from the field, add comments and even view estimated repair costs.
What about Preventive Maintenance?
It is crucial to produce ongoing condition assessments into an annual preventive maintenance tablet; first, track the scores in a maintenance management system, such as FOUNDATION. Automating this part of the process will make everything much easier to follow.
Discover the benefits of developing an effective preventative maintenance program.
Ideally, the facility condition assessment feeds directly into asset management and capital planning. An integrated approach ensures that your team always has accurate information about the facility's ability to meet your organization's needs. Further, you will have a simplified format to show decision-makers at your organization, explaining why an aging unit needs to be replaced.
With the help of facility management software, it becomes easier to prioritize and analyze data points from your FCA against health and safety regulations. The FCA is a valuable tool for forecasting budgets and determining long-term investments. Our FOUNDATION Solution can help streamline facility condition inspections by providing you with best-in-class workflows and costing libraries that consider industry-wide replacement value benchmarked against deferred maintenance deficiencies. This data gives executives a 360-degree view of the status of existing assets across all facilities.
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