Facilities Management Best Practices
Facility maintenance management is a growing job field. From now to 2024, the job is projected to have 12,800 openings. In comparison, only 12,000 employees are projected to fill the openings. This means that there’s a growing demand for facility managers.
What exactly is facility maintenance management?
Facility maintenance management, in simple terms, is ensuring facilities are kept in tip top shape. In order to do this, some of the common responsibilities include:
1. Upkeeping the facility. All facility assets should be secured and cleaned. The facility manager is responsible for making policies and talking with employees enforce policies.
2. Maintaining equipment and supply. Equipment and supply must be well organized and tracked. As well, equipment should be in working condition and regularly repaired.
3. Managing a budget. Facility managers are given a budget and need to ensure purchases and repairs are within budget. Managers need to determine when and what to buy.
What are 3 ways to help facility managers?
Facility managers have a lot of responsibilities to juggle. In order to prevent a ball from dropping, there are available tools to help manage facilities. For example, a powerful tool is RFID tags. These tags track objects in facilities.
Since using RFID tags, other tools have emerged. Let’s explore 3 questions and solutions that are commonly faced in facility maintenance management:
Where are my assets?
Ah yes, the age-old question. One of the basic job duties is keeping track of all facility items. If losing an item at home is frustrating, imagine losing a valuable item in a large facility. When facilities have hundreds of assets, things can easily get messy. How has asset tracking adapted?
Facility managers commonly use RFID chips. These chips are attached to assets and tells managers if assets are still on site. Over time, this evolved. Instead of using RFIDs, more managers are starting to use asset beacons. Asset beacons provide real time location tracking over longer distances than RFIDs.
An example of using asset beacons is locating pallets in a large facility. For one facility, their main goal is keeping track of hundreds of pallets. By attaching bluetooth tag tracker, workers are able to use their phones to track where the pallets are. As a result, workers found it much easier to locate assets.
How can I track information besides asset location?
For a lot of facility managers, it is not enough to just know asset location. In some industries, more information needs to be collected. This meant facility managers had to upgrade from using RFID. Since most RFIDs only provide location tracking, asset beacons are used instead.
Asset beacons provide other data. For example, BeWhere is able to collect data such as light exposure, temperature, and asset impact.
An example of when these extra data points is useful is in a medical facility. Some medical facilities use BeWhere on their medical bags. With BeWhere, facility managers are able to better protect the bags from theft and heat damage. Their facility managers receive alerts such as when the bags are opened and when bags are exposed to hot temperature.
How can I manage asset repairs and services?
A common challenge is figuring out when facility assets need to maintained or ordered. For a long time, managers manually made spreadsheets and logs. This was not a robust way to keep data and tasks sometimes got lost.
A new effective management tool is preventative maintenance software. Preventative maintenance software is the ultimate communication tool. It lets staff assign and update jobs. As well, managers are able to contact vendors to restock inventory.
An example of using preventative maintenance software is in repair facilities. With this tool, managers were able to assign new repair jobs to mechanics. As well, if more parts were needed for the repair, the software contacts vendors to start an order. With this process, repairs were done on time.
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