How to Optimize Your Facility Assets

With a smart facilities asset management solution, your teams can go well beyond just “managing” your assets and move to optimizing them.  The outcome is teams that deliver significant savings & efficiencies that go right to the bottom line for the company. ​​

Asset Management is evolving and getting more attention than ever.  Leading facilities teams recognize that collaborating in support of optimizing asset lifecycle management takes a community.   Through a collaboration among facilities, finance, engineering, accounting, and procurement working together in new ways – asset optimization becomes a reality, contributing significantly to the bottom line and health of the business.  In other words, like so many elements of Facilities Management, companies benefit when asset management is supported with software tools that make it an efficient, optimized “team sport.”  

Smart facilities asset management starts with data.

At the heart of asset optimization is the ability for experts across the business to be able to share a common view into real-time accurate data in the context and form best suited for their specific functional needs.  Different businesses have different priorities and not all assets are created equally.  Software solutions need to offer an asset-centric view that incorporates all of the key data attributes that are important – by asset class and by the type and location of the assets.  

Operate, maintain, & renew.

Operations teams across the business rely on assets being in good working condition when they are needed.  Legacy asset management solutions often live in silos among individual functional teams and many times are glorified spreadsheets, if not actual spreadsheets.  

Modern asset optimization requires a software solution that is tightly integrated with a facilities teams’ work order and project management systems.

Modern Facilities Asset Management Solutions Must Support Key Features.

INTEGRATION WITH WORK ORDER MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE SOLUTION. Seamless integration between systems that support both an asset-centric view of history and the preventative & reactive maintenance WO activity deliver significant financial benefits.  This type of integration can enable real-time informed decisions surrounding asset health and costs associated with repair verses replacement options. 

ACCESSIBILITY FOR MULTIPLE ROLES ACROSS THE ORGANIZATION.  Easy role and permissions-based access to the data that is important to each business function supports collaborative decision making based on the expertise of the full community of functions that can add value to asset management decisions.  Communications and alerts can be configured to make sure that the right individuals get the information they need, in the form they prefer (email, alerts, texts) in the timeframe that is appropriate based on priority.

ASSET TAGGING.  Modern solutions should support asset tagging in a robust fashion that helps the business of facilities management and maintenance.  By incorporating asset tagging with the facilities management solution technicians, facilities teams, and engineering teams can have a comprehensive view of the asset history with the scan of a tag in the field or on their desktop. 

FLEXIBILITY TO CONFIGURE AND MANAGE DIFFERENT ASSET CLASSES UNIQUELY.  Not all assets are created equally.  The ability to establish and configure workflow automation and communications tied to business logic on an asset class by asset class basis is a powerful optimizer for facilities teams.   Custom fields that are fully searchable and reportable can be designed for each unique asset class.

SMART AUTOMATION TO SAVE TIME AND MONEY WHEN MANAGING FACILITY ASSETS.  By automating triggers and workflow associated with in-warranty maintenance, facilities teams can assure that no unnecessary expenses are incurred for in-warranty repairs and that the appropriate providers or suppliers are dispatched to perform the work.  Additional features such as call avoidance checklists and alerts that call out potential duplicate work orders also save time and money.

ROBUST REPORTING AND ANALYTICS CAPABILITIES FOR PLANNING, DECISIONS SUPPORT, AND ANALYSIS.  As noted, savings and efficiency that help you optimize facility assets start with rich, accurate, and up-to-date data that is accessible via easy to use highly available SaaS software platform.   All data fields, inclusive of custom fields, should be available for reporting and analytics as required based on role-based user permissions.  The solution should also incorporate extensible connections to other enterprise systems as required via sophisticated application interfaces (API’s).

Benefits Start at Acquisition with Smart Facilities Asset Management.

Modern software empowers users well beyond just the facilities team in doing their part for optimizing the value of facilities assets.  Once armed with rich data (taking advantage of custom fields like tracking HVAC Brand A vs HVAC Brand B), procurement and finance teams can get a full picture of the total costs of ownership of Brand A vs Brand B as an example by seeing acquisition costs, performance data (uptime/etc), and maintenance costs in one place.  This provides those teams with powerful leverage for negotiating future contracts with both national service providers and / or directly with suppliers.   

Closing the Loop with Value on the Back End: Retiring Assets.

The financial value of asset optimization at the end of life for assets can take many forms.  A modern asset optimization solution supports capital planning as noted previously in the form of data that can be used for budgeting or procurement leverage.  Additionally, however, a modern software solution enables capital asset planning that yields significant financial savings to a company through optimizing repair vs replace decisions in real-time.  By integrating asset-specific data inclusive of the acquisition price, book value, and historical maintenance costs in a quick and easy visual depiction, a facility professional can quickly see if a repair of $4K as proposed by a vendor in the field makes sense or if it is time for replacing the asset.  

Many customers go a step further and track asset “condition” in such a way that enables them to easily get a snapshot of assets that will likely need replacement in the next fiscal year.  This data is invaluable to facilities to support planning the replacement projects, for procurement for negotiating the new purchases, for engineering as they evaluate brand a vs brand b, and for finance and accounting as they prepare for the capital outlay associated with the assets.

Conclusion: You Need a Smart Facilities Asset Management Solution.

When evaluating facility management software, don’t sell yourself short by missing out on a facilities management software solution that has robust work order management AND comprehensive asset management and data analytics capabilities.  These modern software asset management systems can yield significant savings, often delivering a payback in a few months of implementation.

Fexa offers a comprehensive facilities management software solution that delivers all of the aforementioned attributes of a modern asset management solution with a world-class work order management solution.  The proof is always in the pudding, so to speak! We would love to not just tell you about our solution, but show it to you!  Let us show you how Fexa can deliver an ROI of 250%+ in year one and take your business to the next level of modern asset optimization.