Categories
What is facilities management?
Facilities management involves overseeing and maintaining the assets, services, and infrastructure of a business to ensure everything runs smoothly. It ensures safety, comfort, efficiency, and sustainability.
What are the types of facilities management?
Hard facilities management
Hard facilities management services focus on managing the physical assets of a building. It includes activities like plumbing, wiring, fire safety, equipment maintenance, building maintenance, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). In short, hard facilities management ensures safety and adherence to compliance standards required by law.
Soft facilities management
Soft facilities management services focus on optimizing the usage of spaces. It includes activities like pest control, decorating, catering, waste management, landscaping, cleaning services, and car parking. In short, it makes buildings more pleasant and enhances the experience of its occupants.
Why businesses should efficiently manage their facilities
Provide a safe working environment
Regular safety checks, timely replacement of faulty equipment, and eliminating potential hazards provides a safe working space for everyone in the building. It also creates a proactive environment that minimizes the likelihood of accidents and injuries.
Increase employee satisfaction
Creating a comfortable atmosphere improves productivity. Implementing proper lighting, ergonomic furniture, pleasant fragrances, and open workspaces reduces discomfort and leads to focused work sessions.
Save on operational costs
Regular asset maintenance reduces the need for replacements and repairs. It also reduces energy consumption, minimizes downtime, extends asset lifespans, and reduces equipment failure.
Optimize workspaces
Space audits help identify underutilized spaces that can be repurposed for better functions. For instance, cleaning up clutter, and using wall-mounted storage units, overhead supply bins, communal work stations, and multi-functional furniture help optimize the look and feel of workspaces.
Manage contractors
It's essential to establish clear requirements from vendors to meet the company's needs and standards. Facilities management helps in tracking their payments, performance, negotiations, contract renewals, and terminations.
Practice environmental sustainability
Monitoring key performance indicators like electricity bills, water consumption, and waste diversion rates help identify wastage and practice long-term environmental sustainability.
Challenges in facilities management
- 1
Step 1: Inefficient task tracking
Facilities management involves tracking routine and emergency tasks like maintenance requests, quality inspections, employee feedback collection, and overseeing compliance standards. It's not always feasible to track these tasks manually, as it can lead to overlooked responsibilities, delays, and duplicated work.
- 2
Step 2: Poor communication
Lack of communication between owners, employees, and external vendors can lead to unclear expectations, missed opportunities, slower response times, and overall poor service.
- 3
Step 3: Inventory control
Inventory management is crucial to prevent the understocking or overstocking of supplies, repair equipment, spare parts, and other essential goods. Without real-time tracking, businesses can incur high operational costs, downtime, and running out of essential items during emergencies.
- 4
Step 4: Manual scheduling
Manually scheduling shifts for staff is tedious and prone to errors. It also lacks the flexibility to quickly reassign shifts, accommodate extra hours during emergencies, cover slots while running into unexpected bottlenecks, and keep everyone in the loop of each other's schedules.
- 5
Step 5: Vendor management
Running a business involves following up with multiple vendors for different services. But without a centralized system, it's difficult to organize their personal information, payments, contracts, and issues in one place.
- 6
Step 6: Scalability
As businesses scale, they have to take care of various facilities and stakeholders across multiple locations. Processes that work for a single location may not work for the others. Bottlenecks like these can put a strain on the business if they're not managed efficiently.
How this Zoho Tables template helps businesses enhance facilities management
Centralized software
Zoho Tables acts as a single source of truth for all your facilities management needs. Organize data, assign work, track requests, monitor KPIs, and store contracts in one place.
Versatile data views
Views like grid, kanban, gallery, and calendar help comprehend complex data in simple, coherent ways.
The grid view helps in storing asset lists, vendor directories, and maintenance logs in a structured spreadsheet-style interface.
The gallery view puts a spotlight on building layouts, equipment images, and invoices.
Kanban cards help in ordering service requests by status, like reported, assigned, in progress, awaiting resources, and completed. They also help teams identify hiccups and respond immediately.
The calendar view helps in scheduling inspections, staff shifts, facility bookings, and other time-sensitive activities.
The form view is handy for collecting incident reports, inventory restock requests, complaints, and vendor registration.
Real-time collaboration
Share data with internal and external stakeholders, providing different levels of access—like manager, editor, data maintainer, commenter, and viewer—so everyone stays in the loop without sharing sensitive information. Then add comments to ask questions or request quick updates.
Dashboards
Create dashboards to monitor key performance indicators, interpret data in graphs and charts, and measure progress. Track resource allocation, facility utilization, and incidents in real time.