What a new report reveals about the state of facilities management 2023

JLL Technologies recently surveyed hundreds of facilities management (FM) practitioners about their operations, with a particular focus on priorities for driving higher performance in 2023. Their responses include familiar imperatives for containing costs and doing more preventive maintenance. But there are additional imperatives this year, like sustainability, energy savings, and processing more work orders—all against a backdrop of inflation and a possible recession.

The State of Facilities Management 2023 reveals the visible trends and undercurrents impacting facilities management this year. Here are some takeaways you should know about.

Technology will drive facilities management in 2023

Facility managers and their teams will be challenged to do more with less in 2023. Processing more work orders with less staff—and possibly smaller budgets—obliges software automation and innovative technologies to capture gains in efficiencies to compensate for understaffing.

Shorthanded FM teams will be the norm in the years ahead. Mass retirement of aging facility managers along with hiring freezes and budget constraints will be obstacles to full staffing. Facility managers identify FM labor shortages among their top concerns for 2023. They also report shortages of parts and equipment, decreasing budgets, inflation, and recession fears.

How facilities management teams will get more done this year

• FM software automation, especially for warranty flagging, invoice processing, payments, and reporting, will streamline workflows, save time and money, and better position teams for processing more work orders.
• Preventive maintenance (PM) extends asset life and ensures uptime. PM takes on new importance in 2023 because shortages of parts and equipment dictate that existing equipment remain in service longer.
• Business intelligence enables data-driven decisions for equipment repair-vs-replace decisions, service provider networks, and internal FM operations. BI data informs budgets and asset replacement schedules. It identifies cost savings in service provider networks and shows assets not currently on PM schedules but should be.
• A mobile app with real-time updates and access to asset maintenance histories, photos, serial numbers, etc., enables FMs on the go to have all the information they need at their fingertips for first-time fix and processing more work orders.

The return to facilities management basics

Survey respondents, regardless of FM vertical, were united in their response about what they would prioritize this year. The top three priorities were managing work orders, service providers, and assets, in that order. Those priorities are core FM responsibilities. Focusing on them and best practices, like PM, will leave your team well positioned to meet your work order targets in 2023. Adding technologies like BI and mobile-app functionality will capture efficiencies leading to greater productivity.

Ideally, FM software should also include features that allow FM operations to scale with increased work order volumes. JLL Technologies’ Corrigo Enterprise, the leading FM software for facilities management, processes more than 15 million work orders per year. The immense Corrigo database enables customers to scale their work order volumes to meet their operational demands.

Get The State of Facilities Management 2023 report

Respondents to the JLL Technologies’ FM survey mentioned above had a lot on their minds. Discover how your fellow FM practitioners are planning to do more with less in 2023 as work order volumes increase while economic uncertainty looms and shortages of skilled FM labor persist.

Download your free copy of The State of Facilities Management 2023.