Efficient Facilities Management for Multi-Vendor Projects

A Fexa Use Case

Facilities management solutions that can incorporate multiple work orders and multiple trades offer an advantage when tackling retro-fit or site reconfiguration projects. 

Tackling facilities management multi-vendor projects

Facilities management is evolving. Functions are merging. There has never been a greater need for a broader, more collaborative community — a community working together in a coordinated and automated manner. Not all work fits nicely into one bucket. Yes, there is reactive, single-trade work, and of course, there is also proactive preventative maintenance.

But what happens when you need to make adjustments to your facility layout, such as reconfiguring stores to accommodate a new inventory line? Or when you find yourself retrofitting the layout to address social distancing guidelines? Here facilities management solutions that can incorporate multiple Work Orders and multiple trades offer an advantage. By tying them into a coordinated and inter-related set of activities within a broader project, you can uniquely support efficient and manageable change.

Going beyond the 1:1 to facilities management multi-vendor projects

Many facilities management solutions operate only on the level of a 1:1 relationship between Work Orders and Vendors/Trades. And in many cases this is appropriate. But what if we consider those times that you want to do things that involve multiple trades, or multiple vendors? You need the ability to track and interrelate these Work Orders in a way that will best allow you to orchestrate the activity.

Communications will be key. Communications to and from each vendor partner involved. Communications to the broader group of vendors/partners to keep everyone up to date and on the same page. Communications to your finance team, providing more information to understand and track the costs of such projects (both capital and expense items). Communications moving efficiently and effectively to project completion!

A multi-vendor workflow toolbox

Fexa provides a toolbox full of options suited to this sort of scenario. Consider an example from one of our customers taking advantage of a number of Fexa features to manage a large retrofit of a facility.

Here is what they did:

1. With Fexa, they created a single, manageable work order that was used to direct a whole slew of vendors across a range of assignments.
2. Using the flexibility of Fexa’s Workflow Designer, they were able to create a workflow that would accommodate the requirements for multi-vendor activities noted above.
3. They made use of Fexa’s Activity Stream tracking (in one centralized location) to be able to look at both the forest and the trees, so to speak, of this large project.
4. With the in-application Notes feature, they were able to employ clever communications strategies to keep everyone on the broader team on the same page as the project progressed.
5. They were able to centralize Proposal and Invoice tracking across this project, managing it all – you guessed it – in one place.
6. Finally, with Fexa’s Custom Fields, they were able to denote specific project planning elements in a way that the finance team loved. They were able to give Finance better insights, quick identification of capital and expense items, and an easy way to track spending across the project’s multiple fiscal years.

Adaptable and smart to meet variety and evolution of needs

We build Fexa to be adaptable and smart because that is what is needed to support the variety and evolving needs of the facilities management community. We are proud of our approach to engaging the community. And we are proud of the innovation we’ve built into our software. But despite this, we know that we do not have the corner on innovation! Our customers are always surprising us with new and inventive ways to apply the tools we provide. And it is our customers who make the most of our adaptable, smart, and extensible facilities management and maintenance solution to derive real business value for their businesses.