3 Ways to Streamline Facility Operations Using Field Service Management Tools

Implementing best practices in facilities maintenance is critical in commercial spaces to ensure resource conservation. For this, one has to regularly carry out maintenance activities to repair electrical points, optimize space utilization, equipment care, and more.

Now, it is difficult for a facility manager to maintain peace in the facility space if they have to manually track the maintenance schedules for each piece of equipment. Unexpected issues like broken equipment can cause further burden.

To streamline facility management — one must opt for field service management software to automate operations. 

What is field service management software for facility management? 

Field service management software helps streamline field service operations involved in facility maintenance. It automates manual and repetitive tasks across maintenance scheduling, worker management, payments, inventory tracking, and more.

With FSM software, one can streamline and coordinate tasks since it provides much-needed visibility into the operations. This helps implement advanced strategies like:

• Preventive maintenance schedules 
• Route optimization 
• Monitoring safety standards 
• Automating operations to adjust for compliance, and much more.

It is impossible to do the above using mere spreadsheets as it will lead to errors and take a lot of time off productive tasks. 

5 key FSM software features for facilities maintenance

When choosing the right FSM software for facility management, check for five key features below:

1. Asset tracking and management: to check equipment health across HVAC systems, storage, electricals, security components, and more, one requires a centralized dashboard highlighting asset status. 
2. Maintenance schedule: for the available job and equipment, the FSM software uses algorithms to study the equipment's health, vendor recommendations, usage patterns, and more to design maintenance schedules. 
3. Mobile app for on-site technicians: for on-the-move workers and managers, having a mobile app helps with real-time communication, documentation of jobs, and sharing updates. 
4. Customizable dashboards that share alerts and notifications for important workflows help get visibility over the facility in a centralized location. 
5. Contractor management features help handle vendors, contracts, renewals, vetting for new resources, and more. 

3 strategies to implement using FSM software for facility management

Using the above five features, your facility can implement below advanced facility management strategies: 

1. Preventive maintenance 

FSM software helps automate preventive maintenance workflows. This helps increase equipment lifespan wherein you carry out regular maintenance based on usage data to avoid breakdowns. 

• Workflow example: A commercial building has a complex HVAC system that regularly requires cleaning and inspection. To ensure employee satisfaction, it is of prime importance to prevent malfunction. FSM software, based on IoT-led equipment data, automatically generates work orders when triggers are met. These triggers could be sudden temperature rises. It will assign relevant technicians to service and update equipment status. 

2. Facility’s energy management 

To reduce operational costs, one significant area where facilities can save is how well they manage their energy usage. Choose an FSM software that can integrate with any energy consumption tracking solution or else, consider taking an energy management software and sync data to determine accurate energy patterns. These integrations help monitor energy consumption patterns so that you can decide on redesigning your energy needs. 

• Workflow example: Let’s say you have integrated IoT sensors into your HVAC equipment to track energy consumption. This gives facility managers data on how each equipment uses energy across HVAC systems. Whenever there is a random increase in power consumption, it will alert the manager. FSM software with analytics can also identify trend patterns and deviations from expected ranges. This will help design a remedy to fix such deviations or take a call to replace them, thus avoiding any facility downtime. 

3. Asset lifecycle tracking

FSM software, thanks to cloud storage of various operational data, can track the complete asset lifecycle. From installation to usage to maintenance schedules, or closure — FSM tracks everyday data and forms insights to increase equipment health or material lifespan. 

• Workflow example: Let’s consider a car manufacturing plant that requires tracking the equipment lifecycle of its assembly lines. FSM software will track usage patterns of the equipment and will alert the manager about anomalies. Now, let’s say the FSM software finds consistent issues, then, FSM software will potentially suggest replacement instead of repairs. Thus, using data and AI, FSM software helps save maintenance costs which may not be fruitful in the long run. 

Get started to experience high uptime with FSM software for facility maintenance

Zuper provides data-driven field service management solutions that help facilities make informed decisions across scheduling, dispatching, maintenance, inventory tracking, and more — book a demo today.