How does FM business intelligence technology make FM teams better prepared?

Uptime, a critical facility management performance metric, refers to continuous, uninterrupted operations for buildings, equipment and assets.   

As custodians of an organization’s assets and customer experience, FMs are expected to be prepared and avoid equipment failure or at least mitigate its consequences. FMs must anticipate when aging assets should be replaced to ensure ongoing operations. Asset replacement decisions have historically been challenging. Without real-time data, FMs relied on experience and educated guesses, which were difficult to justify and impossible to scale.   

Business intelligence (BI) harnesses real-time data from FM operations to inform decisions about repairing or replacing assets. BI also creates cost estimates and replacement schedules years into the future. Its data-driven insights create more accurate budgets and prepare leadership and other stakeholders — including finance and accounting — about upcoming capital expenditures. Advance notice makes everyone better prepared.  

 Not all equipment wear-and-tear is visible; but FM data, especially when integrated with IoT sensors, illuminates unseen problems that threaten equipment uptime and useful life.     

BI’s advance-warning capability is the ultimate FM preparation tool for maximizing uptime.  

How does BI technology save time and money for FM teams? 

Preventive maintenance (PM) is an effective long-term strategy for increasing asset life and saving money over the long term. PM increases the productive capacity of assets and contributes to predictable FM operations, which, in retail facilities, especially, enhances customer experience and builds brand reputation. 

Per the Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals, reactive (i.e., break-fix) repairs are three-to-five times more expensive than PM and take three times longer to complete. BI dashboards, which present high-level metrics of FM performance, identify assets not currently on PM schedules but should be and includes links for easily creating schedules. Increasing the ratio of PM to break-fix is an FM industry best practice. BI dashboards show the current percentage of PM to break-fix, giving FMs a target and incentive for more PM to capture additional time- and long-term-cost savings.  

One of the fastest ways BI captures near-term savings is by highlighting underperforming service providers and recommending corrective measures, like renegotiating labor rates or replacing providers altogether. Savings are generated quickly, usually at the time of the first or next invoice.  

FM teams, many of which are understaffed, become more efficient using business intelligence to inform decisions about their service providers. BI dashboards show:  

• Performance over time along with scores, labor rates, percentage of on-time completion and first-time fix  

• How performance of service providers compares to local market benchmarks  

• Potential cost savings through more effective management of service provider networks  

• Alternative service providers in specific regions with easy-to-understand ranking and performance metrics  

Why does FM need BI right now?

If you are an FM with reduced staff, a high percentage of break-fix repairs, too much data from your FM software and no idea how to use it, you now have four solid reasons why BI is right for your FM operations.  

1.   It would take an FM team weeks to crunch the data that BI generates in a fraction of that time 

BI algorithms do the hard work of connecting thousands of FM data points and presenting the metrics that matter in easy-to-understand dashboards with insights available to all FM stakeholders. No need for FM teams to dig through mountains of data, extract results, analyze them and present them. And then do it all over again next month. BI does it automatically on a schedule you create.  

2. BI improves the way FM teams manage service providers   

Managing a service provider network without FM software or business intelligence is laborious. BI simplifies the process. Sophisticated algorithms power Corrigo’s Service Provider Insights dashboard that identifies cost-savings hidden inside a provider network and makes data-driven recommendations for capturing them.   

3. BI better prepares FM teams to prevent or mitigate downtime 

Corrigo’s Asset Insights dashboard gives FM teams early warning of asset failure and enables them to take corrective action. Readiness is an FM imperative, a critical component of team performance, and an expectation of the FM job role. Without BI, understaffed FM teams struggle to satisfy all three.  

4. BI offers visibility into your FM operations 

The historical view of FM as a cost center creates a necessity for cost containment. That’s difficult to achieve without BI dashboards offering visibility into work orders, service providers, assets and workflows — collectively, the variables that can be optimized for time- and cost-savings. BI data inside Corrigo BI’s Operational Insights dashboard informs budgets, illuminates overspending and spotlights workflow bottlenecks where simple streamlining would save time to free up FM teams for higher priority work. BI delivers a bundle of benefits and raises the role of FM from cost center to value-driver.  

Interested in learning more about the advantages of business intelligence? Visit jllt.com/corrigo/business-intelligence/.