With rising labour, material and energy costs eating away at FM budgets, facilities managers need to optimise their supplier relationships to get more value for money. But how?
How can you improve the visibility and control around the way you work with third parties? How can you optimise performance and minimise compliance failures when you are dependent on so many different players located in different places?
If you haven’t got a single digital location to store all your key documents, you’re already in danger of losing track of vital data and information. Risk Assessment Methods Statement (RAMS), insurance, warranties, permits to work: all these vital files can float around in different drives, emails and filing cabinets making them difficult to locate and act on when you need to. But collecting them in one place is only half the battle.
If you’re going to save time, money and control the danger of compliance risks going under the radar, you need to automate your workflows and make sure they’re directing action when it counts.
Using Excel sheets is not enough. You need a proper document management solution as part of CAFM that locks key documents in place and makes them discoverable. A good CAFM will let you use metadata to trigger reminders and alerts, keeping you on top of what needs to be done. It will let you:
Improving contractor performance is a two-way street. But providing enough detail for an engineer to deliver better first-time fix rates can be a challenge. The right CAFM should offer the following work order features to improve task management:
If you don’t have the data to monitor how your supply chain is performing it’s impossible to benchmark and maintain high standards of service.
A good CAFM should come with the following tools to report on KPIs and actively manage trends:
Many businesses waste money on extra callouts when jobs should be consolidated.
However, without the data to analyse and the digital tools to automate routing - it’s tricky to identify and action the opportunities. Look for software that can:
Many businesses struggle with visibility around work orders assigned to internal engineers. Businesses using spreadsheets and email to manage contractor visits can’t see what is being closed, where problems have arisen and how costs are mounting up. The most effective CAFM tools come with the following features.
Using the right CAFM software will help you triage work requests more effectively and give engineers better visibility of their assigned work.
It will track how well they are performing, responding and how long it takes to close down jobs.
This will help you:
It’s simple enough to list what a business needs to improve the quality and control the costs of their FM function, but it’s more difficult to implement the tools and processes that will actually make the difference.
Companies who want to take control of their supplier relationships need to find a partner that can help them prioritise the changes that will have the most impact on their operations and guide them through the configuration and launch process.
Make sure you have a roadmap before you start so you can:
If you don’t have that plan, and a partner to guide you, it doesn’t matter how good your software is, it could just end up being unused, unloved and a massive waste of money.