The work of facility maintenance managers is complex and demanding, and many report that they’re struggling to keep up.
According to a recent FacilitiesNet survey, which asked facility maintenance managers to rate their top job-related concerns, the most common response was resource shortages, followed by the related problem of increasing workload.
Considering the wide-ranging demands from owners, occupants, and staff that facility maintenance managers must contend with, it’s easy to see why these two concerns top the list. If facility maintenance managers aren’t highly organized and proactive, problems can quickly mount, leaving them short of resources and forcing them to log extra hours to get work done.
This is a big part of the reason why a facility management software has gone from being a luxury to a necessity for many facility maintenance managers. These solutions help them get a handle on their workload, prioritize, and make the transition from reactive to preventive maintenance.
+ Planning and managing resources
Labor, inventory, and equipment must all be carefully tracked and maintained to prevent shortages. If a facility manager is tracking this information in spreadsheets or paper documents, it’s a safe bet that they are wasting time on administrative work that would be better spent on planning.
This is why it’s important to bring information on all critical resources together in one place. Tracking data across multiple spreadsheets or books that must be reconciled can lead to inaccuracies, and it can be difficult, if not impossible, for facility maintenance managers to get a true grip on the overall resources picture.
Planning for future resource allocation requires accurate, reliable data. For instance, ManagerPlus will automatically calculate the estimated hours that a job will take based on previous work orders. That way, facility maintenance managers can predict with higher accuracy the amount of time that a given job will take.
To ensure that inventory is stocked sufficiently, facility management managers can run an “Inventory Suggested Reorder” report, which uses historical data to make accurate reorder suggestions. They can also run the “Inventory Parts On-Hand” report to see what’s currently available.
These reports are straightforward and simple, but gathering the data needed to run them would be time intensive and tedious in spreadsheets or paper systems, and calculating future needs would have to be done manually.
+ Centralizing requests and prioritizing
Managing maintenance requests using only basic tools like email and spreadsheets is a recipe for disaster. Problems can easily fall through the cracks if there is no centralized system for tracking them.
This is why it’s vital for facility maintenance managers to track work requests in a full-featured maintenance system like ManagerPlus. Requests can be submitted directly to the system by anyone who is authorized by the program administrator, with no limit on the number of people who can be authorized.
Thus, a facility manager can create a clear, orderly system for processing requests that does not entail the prolonged back-and-forth exchanges over email or phone that drain time and resources. And because requests submitted to ManagerPlus must be assigned a priority, it is easy for facility maintenance managers to quickly see what the most urgent issues are, and respond accordingly.
Tracking work requests this way also provides more transparency for stakeholders. They can log in and see the status of their request at any time, including any changes in status or notes that have been added. This can help cut down on time consuming follow-up.
With the economy still shaky and budgets still tight, facility maintenance managers must be proactive if they hope to resolve their resource and workload problems. With the powerful planning and data tracking tools available in maintenance management software like ManagerPlus, this will be much easier to accomplish.
