I manage my company’s 500,000 square foot (46,451 square meter) corporate headquarters. I have had an integrated workplace management system in place for five years. We use it for space planning, space management, move management and maintenance management. Our system has additional capabilities such as asset management, lease management (we lease seven other buildings throughout the country) real estate management, capital program management and environmental sustainability. How can I leverage this technology to provide the maximum amount of value to my company?

From Dr. Doug Aldrich

This is a great opportunity, but one needing careful consideration. I would seek answers to some of these questions:

  • Do the packages in place now provide a maximum value commensurate with your resources to support? Did you rewrite them to meet your company’s needs? Some users say 70 percent might be required.

  • Will you evaluate each of the other packages separately or bring in the whole capability? These are very different processes. How will you evaluate their value and cost? Can these be benchmarked in your industry?

  • How much might they have to be rewritten to fit your company? Do they fit your current workflows, or do you have to alter those to reduce the systems rewrite? What will the supplier do for you?

  • Do you feel comfortable putting all these eggs in one basket? What are your backups should the company go belly up? Have you ever considered eliminating or outsourcing a package?

  • Do you have an emergency plan in place now, and can it be expanded in the future with other packages? Who backs up all your data, and how is this done? Is there a proprietary concern with this information?

  • Are there internal resources (systems support, data input/review people, online tools, etc.) that give you a high probability of successfully continuing? Does the supplier provide necessary support at a reasonable cost?

  • Having success to date is comforting but check for stability and then evaluate future adds accordingly. A good consultant gives advice — and a great one asks (sometimes unpopular) questions.

From Wayne Collins

The system mentioned certainly covers many facets of the FM mandate. Here are a few additional important considerations:

  • Resources to manage and maintain the system. Even with the best systems that are user friendly and streamlined with various portal options and modules to reflect the organizational requirements, it is imperative that you have enough dedicated and trained staff to manage and maintain all components of the system.

  • Meaningful information that is readily accessible. Dashboards and summary information enable you to drill down upon request for further details. This information should only contain the key data elements that correlate to measurable goals and metrics.

  • Automated tasks and exception report generation. Have the system periodically generate reports and send to targeted user groups based on triggers or defined criteria for key performance. No lengthy reports. Just a snapshot of progress and comparative data from the last interval. Highlight the exceptions where the focus needs to be for follow up.

  • Flexible interface for ad-hoc queries. Have an option to mine data for specific queries that are not part of canned tabular reports.

  • Shared data repository. If the above system is from one vendor, there should be a standard integrated approach for maintaining user data and lookup information. If some of these needs are being met from different vendors, then information will be duplicated and not shared unless integration strategies are employed with some form of middleware, which is another challenge to keeping everything consistent and functional.

  • Ability to export information. This sounds fundamental and it is a feature most systems should have. That said, how much work must be done to extract this data for use in another tool or platform?

  • AI and analytics. You hear a lot these days about artificial intelligence (AI) and how this can be implemented for capabilities that increase responsiveness to workflows that would normally require several manual processes and human intervention to facilitate a similar result. At a minimum, you want to leverage the analytical capabilities of business intelligence tools and platforms that can be configured for specific needs and objectives.