Exceptional asset and facility management
The best time to fix something is before it breaks. Because according to the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals, the fix, also known as a reactive repair, will take longer and cost more than preventive maintenance.
Asset management, a core responsibility of facilities management (FM) teams and often the largest component of their budgets, is forward-looking. It uses preventive maintenance, sometimes called proactive maintenance, to anticipate and mitigate equipment and system failures.
A regularly maintained asset, which could include HVAC units, office lighting, roofs, plumbing, elevators, or machinery, will cost less to operate, last longer, have more uptime, and produce a higher ROI than assets without scheduled maintenance.
The data, analytics, and insights available in a modern computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) enable proactive maintenance at scale, which is essential for tracking hundreds or thousands of individual assets across a distributed geographic footprint.
CMMSes enable exceptional asset management in five key ways.
1. Automation
CMMS automation eliminates time-consuming manual tasks and frees up FM teams for higher priority work. The ability to automate work order creation, invoices, not-to-exceed thresholds, warranty coverage, and more yields significant time- and cost-savings. The time-savings are especially valuable because many FM teams are understaffed due to pandemic-related layoffs, furloughs, and early retirements.
2. Real-time updates
Asset management requires the participation of multiple stakeholders, all needing visibility into asset data. Cloud computing updates all information and communications in real time, enabling better decision-making, especially for repair versus replace decisions for expensive equipment. Real-time updates are essential for FM portfolios spanning multiple countries and time zones.
3. All data in one secure place
When a technician needs a part number, a facilities manager needs a maintenance record, or a CFO needs an asset’s book value, up-to-date information is available to all stakeholders inside the CMMS. All information about the asset is available in one convenient place. By contrast, unsophisticated, paper-driven systems may have asset information scattered across multiple departments and filing cabinets.
4. Insights for higher FM performance
FM teams mired in reactive maintenance rarely have time for the deep analysis and strategies necessary for boosting operational and financial performance. The automation, acceleration, and optimization features of a powerful CMMS, however, save time and enable teams to take advantage of CMMS data and insights. For example, Corrigo will analyze data and send alerts when an aging asset is approaching the end of its useful life. The data-driven recommendation, based on actual asset performance and average industry lifecycle cost, will inform capital budgets and provide justification to company leadership for retiring and replacing the asset.
5. Minimizes asset downtime
Properties like supermarkets and restaurants are revenue-generating. If a store or restaurant is closed temporarily due to equipment failure, lost sales revenue often exceeds the actual repair cost of a broken appliance or non-functioning AC unit. Non-monetary costs of downtime include inconvenienced customers and damage to the company’s brand reputation.
Without the asset data, analytics, insights, and alerts in a CMMS or enterprise asset management system, the closed store would have little warning of a store-closing malfunction. With these technologies, however, facilities managers can use business intelligence and insights to predict and prevent—or at least minimize the impact of—unscheduled downtime.
Conclusion
Successful asset management drives successful facilities management. Our latest ebook shows how to harness powerful automation and optimization features in your CMMS for delivering exceptional asset management at scale.
