Optimize employee efficiency and cut costs: How Ask James gives you the crucial data and insights you need

We live in an increasingly data-centric world, and Facility Management (FM) is no exception. Data insights are what empower Facility Managers to create employee-centric workplaces. In these organizations, workers feel truly valued and catered for. It’ll come as no surprise that that’s key for optimizing employee efficiency — happy employees are motivated, productive, and creative employees.

Data is also key, of course, when it comes to streamlining costs. From actioning preventive maintenance to honing in on the detail of your vendor contracts, granular insights carry serious monetary value.

So how can you gather and analyze the data you need across the hard and soft assets in your FM ecosystem? Working with an Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) is the ideal route there. If your organization is already working with ServiceNow, the Ask James application is an easy IWMS add-on that can start data-driving your FM.

Optimize costs with soft service data insights 

Where there was pressure to streamline spending in FM before, it’s only more intense now. As remote and hybrid work becomes common across the workforce, large-scale real estate is an ever more expensive asset to manage.

As a result, strategic downsizing is a key Facility Management goal. By intelligently extracting more efficient usage from fewer square meters of office space, you can reduce costs while accommodating your employees’ changing working patterns. The Ask James IWMS can help!  

Intelligent booking with Ask James

Ask James enables employees to flexibly manage their workspace bookings. From individual desks to your office’s meeting rooms, they can make and cancel reservations via Ask James’ intuitive mobile and desktop interfaces.

Prefer to work from home today? Simply cancel your reservation, and another employee will be able to use that desk. Need to come into the office for a meeting or collaborative team session? Team managers can block out specific zones, ensuring there’s enough space for everyone to meet and work comfortably.

Infusing your real estate assets with this flexibility will enable more efficient use, in less space. Overall, that means significant cost-cutting potential.

Leverage data for full vendor management control

With Ask James, Facility Managers can enjoy full insight into what’s actually going on with the various vendors they work with. Ask James manages the entire process: Employees log requests via its user-friendly interface, these are assigned to a specific vendor, and the vendor can log actions taken via their own intuitive vendor portal.

Ask James can centrally house key information on your vendor contracts, too. If any of these are breached — the agreed response windows for maintenance requests, for example — Ask James can flag this for you. This data is crucial for backing up decisions to switch vendors if needed, and ensuring that your organization’s FM funds are truly well spent.

Vendor efficiency = employee efficiency

Of course, ensuring your vendor landscape is populated with top quality providers has a direct effect on employee performance, too. This rings true from a soft FM asset angle, as well as a hard asset angle.

For example: If catering requests are always correct and on time, that helps meetings run as smoothly as possible — and creates the best impression for key client appointments. If plumbing, cleaning, and climate control issues are resolved as rapidly and professionally as possible, employees experience minimal disruption to their daily workflow. So across the full FM spectrum, optimizing vendor provision via data insights can boost employee efficiency, too.

Access key workplace data to meet your sustainability goals

Aside from FM cost-effectiveness and turbocharging employee efficiency, there’s another key theme on Facility Managers’ minds: Workplace sustainability.

With a top of the range IWMS such as Ask James, your organization will be able to break down its energy consumption per country, per year, and per quarter. This level of granularity is an indispensable asset when it comes to meeting sustainability reporting requirements, achieving your internal planet-conscious goals, and mapping potential savings on energy usage and bills.

Lower costs, higher efficiency with Ask James

As a leading IWMS solution, Ask James is primed to crunch all the data you need to take your FM forward. Across employee productivity, vendor management, and corporate sustainability, it’s a key ally for employee-centric organizations. 

For more information on adding Ask James to your company’s ServiceNow portfolio, visit www.askjamesnow.com to schedule your demo.