How to make smarter decisions in Facilities Management (using historical and real-time data)

Leveraging real-time data in Facilities Management

Accessing real-time Facilities Management data gives you a clear overview of — and the ability to adaptively control — your daily facilities operations. Whether to optimize your vendor service provision or enhance your employees’ daily workplace experience, these real-time insights are key to elevating FM.

Real-time data to enhance vendor service provision

When it comes to vendor management, for example, smart Facility Management software like Ask James provides your vendors with an immediate, intuitive view on which of the tickets you’ve logged are running out of time in relation to your SLA.

This positions your vendors to make informed prioritizations, so that they can provide smooth and uninterrupted service for your organization. This helps to ensure a consistent, quality experience for your employees. In addition, it ensures the ability to punctually assess the service level you’ve been receiving from each vendor. As for informing a strategic, data-driven decision on whether you will renew each vendor’s services based on their performance over your full contract period, that’s where historical data comes in useful — we’ll explore this further below.

From a vendor perspective, with access to your Ask James platform, they are able not only to view in real time which incident tickets are most urgent, but also where the relevant assets are located on your premises. This contributes to ensuring your employees’ requirements are met as efficiently as possible within your facilities, enhancing their daily workplace experience.

Real-time data to elevate employee experience

Beyond ensuring any asset-related incidents that your employees might log are addressed as soon as possible, real-time facility data collection can be utilized to evolve their workplace experience in other ways.

Let’s take choosing where and when they eat within your workplace as an example. With a real-time view on how busy your catering facilities are, as well as the menu that they’re offering that day, employees will be able to plan out their mealtimes based on both time-saving and enjoyment criteria.

Data-driven Facility Management also enhances room booking ease and adaptability for your employees. With access to an always-updated reservations system — via Ask James on desktop or mobile, for example — your employees can view which teams or individuals have made which space bookings. This facilitates easy swaps if needed, as well as enabling individual employees to ensure they book workspaces near to their colleagues, to optimize their capacity for collaboration and productivity.

Leveraging historical data in Facilities Management

While real-time Facilities Management data can guide spontaneous decision-making day to day, longer-term, strategic decision-making hinges on historical data. As a result, one of the key advantages of Ask James FM software is the ease with which it enables Facility Managers to track and report on both data types.

Ensure cost-effectiveness via trend analysis

The trends revealed in strategic, longer-term data reports are what have the potential to highlight key cost-saving opportunities for Facility Managers. Often, such trends can be revealed via looking into a few well-chosen questions:

• What does space usage within your premises look like over time?
• What is the space’s occupancy % across given days, weeks, or months?
• Over time, what’s the balance between your reserved and available workspaces?
• Over a contract duration, how has a specific vendor performed in relation to the SLA?
• Have your employees been satisfied with, for example, catering provision since you introduced your new provider, or do trends in survey results indicate it’s time for a change?
• Is it worth repairing a certain asset, given its value depreciation, or would it be more sustainable to just replace it?

With the Facilities Management analytics that smart software like Ask James enables, you’ll be positioned to make the strategic, cost-optimizing decisions required. Whether these mean downsizing square footage based on usage trends, making the right call on extending, renegotiating, or ending vendor contracts in line with agreed notice periods, or actioning preventive maintenance, data-driven insights are a crucial ally.

Make the right calls with data-driven Facility Management

For further detail on how to go about choosing the right Facility Management software for your workplace’s needs, you can download our Facility Management Software Buyer Guide here.