Day-to-day operational costs are escalating and FM budget cuts are looming. With nearly 50% of FMs reporting flat-lining or restricted spending, how can you keep on top of growing compliance and performance challenges? Here are 6 ways it can be done.
6 facility management cost saving ideas to prioritise
1. Sort your Planned Preventative Maintenance
Responding quickly when vital equipment fails will minimise business disruption and downtime. PPM makes maintenance requirements more predictable and saves money on emergency call-outs.
To build a functional PPM programme, you don’t need expensive IoT for condition tracking and it doesn’t need to take months to set up. Instead, choose a ‘mobile-first’ CAFM that can help you manage and implement maintenance schedules that your engineers and contractors can easily respond to. Choose a CAFM that lets you:
- Customise service workflows with notifications and reminders
- Report on outcomes of inspections and flag issues in real-time via mobile
- See upcoming and outstanding PPM and compliance tasks in your management dashboard
In a study of one retail business, the savings from proactively maintaining a single chiller unit using PPM gave a 545% ROI against the typical repair and replacement costs of a reactive approach.
You can read more about implementing trouble-free, cost-saving PPM software, right here.
2. Manage your assets digitally
The software firm Sage suggests that up to 30% of fixed assets in a typical business cannot be accounted for. So, do you know how much lost, mislaid or badly maintained assets are costing you every year?
- Do you know where all your assets are located, can you audit them regularly against your records?
- Are you insuring assets you no longer own?
- Do you know the current value of the assets you control?
- Do you know if they are compliant?
- Are you spending more money on maintenance than you would on replacements?
- Are you paying unnecessary call out and repair charges for assets still under warranty?
Replacing a fragmented approach to asset management with a single source of asset truth is one of the most significant ways you can maintain and control maintenance spending, insurance costs and future Capex. Creating a digital asset register will bring greater compliance oversight and financial control to your operations, but it can be complex and time-consuming to set up and maintain.
Learn more about the benefits and pitfalls of implementing a cost-effective asset management software solution here.
3. Automate your work orders
What takes up the most time of Facility Management’s week? The repetitive but essential admin tasks that keep the whole show on the road. Days and weeks of FM time can be spent triaging and responding to emails and phones, manually maintaining the workflows that really should be automated. You may need to operate a large team of Facility Managers if you’re spending time chasing contractor callouts, organising quotes, managing internal resources and keeping the communication flowing.
The solution? Choose a CAFM system that can streamline your work order management, automating data capture, prioritisation, triage and the way you seek and filter quotes from contractors.
But make sure your workflows can be changed and adapted to fit the specific needs of your business or you’ll be wasting time and money changing your process to match supplier templates:
We wanted more of a personalised service from our FM partner, rather than just buying an off-the-shelf piece of software that we’d have to ‘work around’. We wanted to appoint a supplier who would really understand our needs and personalise a CAFM to our individual requirements.”
Dave Rich, Facilities Director at TeamSport
4. Streamline your teams with a centralised help desk
With a centralised, digital help desk you can build a team that works the way you need it to. Take your team virtual with FM software, employ the people you want wherever they are located. Cut down on required office space and streamline staffing requirements through advanced automation.
Centralising the helpdesk has helped us utilise our labour better. I don’t need as many people and I can recruit from anywhere. They can all work together using our CAFM as one team, remotely.”
Alan Jones - Activate Learning Group
5. Manage your assets digitally
The software firm Sage suggests that up to 30% of fixed assets in a typical business cannot be accounted for. So, do you know how much lost, mislaid or badly maintained assets are costing you every year?
- Do you know where all your assets are located, can you audit them regularly against your records?
- Are you insuring assets you no longer own?
- Do you know the current value of the assets you control?
- Do you know if they are compliant?
- Are you spending more money on maintenance than you would on replacements?
- Are you paying unnecessary call out and repair charges for assets still under warranty?
Replacing a fragmented approach to asset management with a single source of asset truth is one of the most significant ways you can maintain and control maintenance spending, insurance costs and future Capex. Creating a digital asset register will bring greater compliance oversight and financial control to your operations, but it can be complex and time-consuming to set up and maintain.
Learn more about the benefits and pitfalls of implementing an asset management software solution here.
6. Control your supply chain
A lack of supply chain visibility can be hugely expensive for your business. Many FMs have procured hundreds of suppliers and contractors over the years which they manage via spreadsheets or simply ‘in their heads’.
Mobilising a CAFM will help you understand, maybe for the first time, where suppliers are bringing you value for money and where they are wasting time and failing to deliver.
It could help you monitor KPIs and consolidate lists of suppliers to optimise performance and save on waste:
With our new CAFM, we can do real appraisals with our engineers and contractors. We know how many jobs they’ve been given and how many they’ve completed. We didn’t have that data before. We couldn't challenge or reward them on the basis of their performance.”
Greg Plummer, Facilities Helpdesk Manager, Fitness First
6. Control your energy use
Manual and paper administration costs time and the environment. Shifting to electronic facilities management can eliminate a whole layer of form filling and paper bureaucracy that generates waste. But CAFMs can also help you monitor key energy and asset KPIs to meet tougher environmental regulations.
- Extend asset lifecycle: Using PPM software can reduce failure rate and the need to scrap equipment.
- Use FM data to maintain, monitor and optimise energy consumption of critical assets
- Plan the movement of engineers and contractors to reduce carbon footprint
- Integrate Building Management and CAFM systems to access and control more energy use data
Shifting to a CAFM is the best way to create a centralised and risk-free way of working in this sector, but it’s also a key ESG objective. We needed the digital tools that could work across every device to reduce our reliance on paper and meet our environmental goals.”
Gary Raffray, IT and Facilities Manager, the Hamptons Hospital
Consolidate control with a CAFM
If your FM communication and data is spread across different platforms and applications, it’s a recipe for chaos and confusion. Using multiple platforms can cause you to lose documentation, duplicate work, overwrite data and spend hours every day searching for vital information.
This can slow maintenance down, threaten compliance, drag out audits and waste money.
Using a single CAFM platform can save you time, money and stress. It can bring you complete control and oversight of your budgets, assets, people and processes. But making the wrong choice could tie you up in lengthy configuration projects where ROI is uncertain and hard to calculate.
Instead, choose a CAFM system and a supplier that can help you plan, prioritise and implement the features that will start impacting your bottom line right away. From a strong foundation of work order automation and data management, you can build the long-term digital controls that will deliver greater cost reductions over time.
