The Importance of Analytics in Facility Management.

Analytics FM468 x 60Facility management (FM) software helps users manage maintenance, security and other organizational tasks related to their buildings and sites. But it doesn’t have to stop there: as software advances, the capabilities once separated by different types of software begin to blend together, and a magical combination has come to the world of facilities management. One key example is the growing cooperation between facilities management and business analytics software.

Analytics is a broad term for a set of features that include generating reports, organizing datasets, developing visualizations and other data-focused tasks that help users make more informed business planning decisions.

Analytics in facility management is a match made in heaven — the power of data analytics with the practicality of facilities management combine for a solution that logs problems, analyzes why they occurred and offers solutions to prevent them in the future. Here are just a few ways facility management analytics like SMARTPRINT Alpha™ from FacilityONE can change your business for the better:

Better Insight Into Operations: The first thing analytics can help with is by fostering a basic understanding of what’s going on in your business. It does this through descriptive analytics, or by generating reports about what has happened or is happening with your facility. Managers can use this kind of data to identify assets that need to be repaired, formulate baseline numbers for normal meter readings and more.


Diagnose Problems:
Now that you know what the problems are, you’re ready to start fixing them. The first step to fixing is diagnosing the source of the problem. Diagnostic analytics help users understand why something is occurring — for example, if the same vehicle in your fleet keeps breaking down, diagnostic analytics help identify the problem. Is it not being repaired often enough? Is the same part failing each time? Etc.


Fix Problems:
After these problems are identified and the specific cause discovered, users can utilize prescriptive analytics to fix those problems. This form of analytics works by helping users come to a solution by factoring in knowledge of the situation, available resources, potential solutions, past performance and the current problem. While it doesn’t make the choice for you, it vastly improves the decision-making process to promote confidence in action.


Predict Future Problems:
As if that wasn’t enough, analytics can also help users predict future problems and solutions to those problems. For example, if during hurricane season the last three years your facility sprung a leak, you can pretty safely predict that it will happen again. You can use this knowledge to reinforce the area prone to leaking, budget ahead of time for the extra repair costs, or calculate whether a move to a new location would be the most cost-effective solution over time.

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Adapt Quickly:
A key benefit of using analytics in your facility management is the immediacy — many analytics options update users immediately of a divergence from normal metrics, passing thresholds and other predetermined triggers. This real-time data, along with predicting failures and other issues, can help managers respond instantly to problems rather than only reacting later when the problem has been discovered potentially too late.


Improve ROI:
Being able to adapt quickly has the added benefit of improving the ROI of your facility. FM software helps users schedule preventive maintenance, which reduces catastrophic failures and improves asset lifespan. Analytics help users monitor the assets being repaired, as well as predict lifespans and depreciation methods for those assets. The combination of analytics and FM result in a preemptive-repairing-asset-monitoring machine of a management system, saving you money in the long run on costly repairs and unforeseen issues.

In days past users who wanted to take advantage of these capabilities would have had to purchase a separate business intelligence or analytics solution, but Vintage IBM-PCthat’s no longer true. Many CMMS/EAM/FM solutions (like FacilityONE) offer an analytics module to keep user activity within a single easy interface, reducing the cost and task-switching of an additional software solution.

Do you use analytics when managing your facility? Let us know how in the comments!

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