Preparing Your Facilities for Hurricane Season

Putting a smart facilities management solution on your team can provide significant advantages to preparing your facilities for hurricane season. 

2021 predictions suggest a more active than normal hurricane season. While we cannot stop the weather, at Fexa, we work hard to make sure you have tools to help make your job easier!

Getting our facilities community ready to take on whatever comes their way is part of what we think about every day at Fexa. Predictions for up to 17 named storms, eight hurricanes, and four major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher) are coming from the weather experts for 2021.  We hope this is not something that you will have to deal with, but just in case…

If you can put a smart facilities management solution on your team to help you with hurricane preparedness and response it can make things a little easier!   What makes a facility management solution hurricane “smart,” you ask?  Here are just a few examples of attributes that can go a long way in helping you in preparing your facilities for hurricane season:

1. Custom fields flexibility. 

Smart solution gives you the option to establish a custom field so that any and all work-orders (proactive board ups or reactive damage responses) can be tracked as related to hurricanes.

2. Create Mini-projects with related work orders for “readiness” routines.

 Smart solution allows you to create a mini-project inclusive of multiple trades and inclusive of a built in checklist of items to do in advance of potential hurricane activity for your store locations.

3. Utilize effective and built-in communications capabilities. 

A smart solution allows you to post bulletins in prominent locations within the application to remind store personnel of the protocol for preparing for potential weather related events.

4. Be proactive, create work orders, and put them in a pending state just in case.

Smart solutions allows you to create work orders in a pending state for all stabilization efforts required following an event without assigning those WO to a vendor if and until needed.

5. Budgetary planning. 

A smart solution allows you to easily pull analytics from the prior year hurricane season (assuming you used the custom field noting “Hurricane related work”) and deduce the range of potential expenses by location based on data, not just your hunches.

6. Ad hoc reporting for risk/accounting.

A smart solution allows you to easily create an ad hoc report of all work performed and associated expenses related to hurricane damage anytime when the accounting team or risk management teams reach out and request it. There are lots of ways that you can collaborate with accounting in a smart solution, see more of them here.

7. Be proactive and negotiate favorable rates in a proactive RFP to a national provider partner. 

A smart solution allows FMs to work with procurement to use historical data as the basis for producing a proactive RFP to national vendors to bid on being the provider to support your clean up at better pre-negotiated rates.

8. Make it easy to assure the audit trail is in place for all critical documentation. 

Identify any critical documentation for processing insurance claims or otherwise and alert the provider as a compliance requirement prior to their submission of the invoice for their work.  This can include before/after images as just one example.

9. Easily keep track of relevant labor and materials. 

A smart solution makes it easy for your pre-approved preferred vendors to add in-line items for materials as separate invoice items for better tracking.

10. Reduce risks with efficient stabilization efforts. 

A smart solution enables you to apply a consistent best practice workflow to assure you check all the boxes for location stabilization if there is damage to a location.  Sometimes this can save you up to $350K for an unpleasant incident! 

Conclusion

We hope you do not have to deal with challenges associated with weather-related events in the upcoming year, but we believe that together we can make it easier if you do!  Give us a call and let’s discuss how Fexa could give you the upper hand on preparation for what is predicted to be a nasty weather season.