How Facilities Managers Can Make Data-Driven Decisions

Facilities management has evolved to become a strategic business function as organizations seek ways to reduce operating costs, enhance customer service and improve the bottom line. Data-driven decision-making is at the heart of this transformation, enabling facilities managers to use data in a meaningful way to drive value for their organizations.

Facilities managers are in a unique position to make both short-term and long-term data-driven decisions that can positively impact the bottom line of their businesses. With the right tools and data, facilities managers can do everything from optimizing and building equipment to streamlining energy usage, improving physical asset management, saving money on maintenance and repairs, reducing waste, and more.

Improving Decision-Making in Facilities Management

Data is everywhere. But it’s not enough to have data — you need the correct data, in the right place, at the right time. This is a challenge for any company, but in facilities management, it’s even more important to make decisions and take action using real-time data.

Here are some steps to improve data-driven decision-making in your facility management processes:

• Conduct a comprehensive facilities risk assessment
• Understand your objective(s) and the data to help you achieve them.
• Connect all of your data sources.
• Prioritize data quality and cleanliness over quantity.

Next are the areas where actionable data insights can help facilities managers improve operations handling.

1. Optimizing Equipment Performance

The right tools allow facilities managers to collect real-time data on building equipment performance and energy usage. This data can be used to make informed budgets, predict equipment failures, and plan maintenance schedules. It also reduces unnecessary expenses associated with wasted energy or over-production.

2. Streamlining Energy Usage

Monitoring real-time energy usage is key to understanding your buildings’ energy consumption patterns and making necessary changes for efficient asset management. Data collected from different structures can be compared to help you identify which ones are using too much energy or have been fitted with equipment that generates unneeded waste. Facilities managers can then use this data to install new systems or retrofit existing ones to become more efficient.

3. Data Sharing

Data is only as good as the questions it answers. This means that it’s more important to create a strategy for how data will be used than just collecting a bunch of data, especially since facilities management is integral to business continuity. Hence, data-driven decision-making must be integrated into the overall company culture. A manager can achieve this by establishing standards for sharing data across departments within an organization. Adequate data-sharing protocols ensure that all relevant parties access data and receive this information promptly.

4. Automation

Automate your reporting process using workplace technology. From everyday tasks like room scheduling and maintenance requests, these online applications allow you to create reports with real-time data from your workplace environment in just a few clicks. It’s important to choose solutions that integrate with each other so that you can easily access the information you need and make intelligent decisions based on it.

5. Proactive Maintenance

Savvy facilities managers are moving from a reactive to a proactive maintenance culture. The growth of IoT, machine learning, and smart monitoring technologies mean that today’s building managers can leverage real-time data to improve efficiency and increase productivity. Data takes the guesswork out of physical asset management and maintenance, helping you make more informed decisions about running your buildings and how best to allocate resources to avoid business disruption.

6. Efficient Asset Management

Being able to understand the condition of an asset and get an insight into its performance is critical to making data-driven decisions on whether to repair, maintain or replace it. With so many assets to manage and monitor, facility managers have to find ways to monitor their critical assets easily and use data analysis to reduce downtime and increase efficiency. Once you have enough data, you can use it to make decisions around asset management and maintenance — and even drive new business opportunities.

7. Labor Management

A key area in which facilities managers can use data is labor management. By leveraging data from various sources, a facilities manager can create a staffing schedule that fits their budget, maximizes labor productivity, and provides sufficient coverage so that no tasks are left unfinished or slow-going.

Conclusion

In every sector, data provides a clear picture of how your facilities are performing at any given moment. When problems arise, you can identify them quickly and work out the best solution for your team and budget. When facilities managers can use data to inform their decisions on when to perform maintenance or repairs, they can keep things running with fewer breakdowns and less downtime.

To be a credible decision-maker, you have to have reliable data to make your decisions. At the same time, you have to understand what the numbers mean and how they apply to your project. It’s only by having a clear understanding of the measurable variables that you can truly make informed decisions on managing facilities and resources beyond anything we’ve seen so far.