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How Mobile Technology Benefits Facility Managers To Be More Efficient

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How Mobile Technology Benefits Facility Managers To Be More Efficient

Mobile technology is all around us. It has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years and is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon. This has made it important for businesses to drive mobile development through mobile applications. Managers should harness the power of mobile technology. 

Mobile apps which are a part of the CMMS system can help facility managers achieve a number of tasks like controlling work process flow, tracking assets and employees as well as having control over building facilities to name a few. They can multi-task, communicate, collaborate, and manage workloads more efficiently. Here are some ways businesses benefit from CMMS and mobile technology.

 6 Benefits of Mobile Technology 

The best CMMS software can boast of offering several benefits to businesses. Here are a few ways in which mobile applications benefit the facility managers of any organization.

  •   Increased Productivity

The workforce is getting a lot more mobile these days. While this offers them flexibility, it is important to ensure that it doesn’t hinder their productivity or their ability to work more efficiently. CMMS software supports mobile applications, which in turn address and support the needs of the mobile workforce. Employees can access these apps using secure logins from any location in the world. Moreover, these apps are available on mobile devices as well as desktops, adding more convenience for employees. Due to this, the employees have the luxury to work from anywhere, at any time, even when they are traveling. All this cumulatively leads to their increased productivity.

  •   Access to Information

Considering the pace of the business world, it is important that employees can access crucial information in real time. CMMS programs allow employees to upload data, edit it and view it from any location. Teams can even collaborate on projects together and share information quickly. Facilities managers can efficiently track assets, make changes to the information and ensure that their teams have greater control over it.

  •   Helps in Embracing Adaptability

It is common knowledge that the business world is not static. It constantly evolves and developments are observed, especially in terms of technology. What is relevant today may get obsolete eventually and get replaced by something better. Thus, it is important that businesses should have the ability to adapt to the constant changes they are exposed to. You should be able to respond to a dynamic corporate environment and efficiently maintain the corresponding infrastructure. The computerized maintenance management systems consist of mobile asset management software that allows businesses to adapt to the changes and stay on top of a constantly evolving industry. You can install apps to support the necessary tasks and these apps can be updated with ease. 

  •   Improved Communication

Communication is one of the key factors that can make or break a business. When you are handling a mobile workforce or you have members in your team who work remotely, communicating efficiently through traditional methods can get a little tricky. However, with mobile CMMS, communication can be improved tremendously. You can easily complete tasks such as sharing reports and memos, scheduling jobs, etc., using mobile apps. Managers can even send instructions through their facilities management software and check data in real-time. It is even possible for different members of a team to efficiently work and collaborate on reports and documents in a dynamic manner.

  •   Makes Business Processes More Efficient

Every employee in your company would have access to at least one mobile device, which they carry with them at all times, wherever they go. Businesses need to take advantage of this and make their business tasks mobile-friendly. This will help in making the processes really efficient. Mobile apps will not only allow you to speed up your current operations but also analyze data that are produced in different processes. Moreover, mobile apps can help in figuring out better, faster and easier ways to carry out various tasks at work.

  •   Increased Safety and Security

It is extremely important that you keep various aspects of your business safe and secure. As a facilities manager, you have to track all the assets within the organization. Trying to achieve this manually is not an easy feat and is prone to human mistakes. By using mobile maintenance software, managers have the ability to track and locate their assets in real-time. They can even track who is using which asset, how long the asset is being used, who the visitors are, and if unauthorized people are accessing the assets. You have increased control over the assets and ensure that they are safe at all times. 

EAM can be applied to a wide range of business operations. The preventive maintenance software allows the managers to see through the walls of organizations by keeping an eye on the assets of the facility and helps them handle minor issues before they can get big. In short, we can say that mobile management software implemented in CMMS maintenance software can significantly improve the efficiency and productivity of a workplace.

Author Bio:

Lindsey Walker is the marketing manager for NEXGEN, a Sacramento-based industry leader in designing advanced computerized maintenance management systems and asset management software tools for utilities, facilities, public works, manufacturing, and fleet industries. In her free time, Lindsey enjoys traveling and reading, which allows her to gain new perspectives and inspiration for her work. She is committed to creating content that connects well with her readers, enhancing their digital experiences.

 

software Maintenance

Maintenance Software Myths That Are No Longer True

Software for facility management is nothing new. The underlying technology has been available since the early 2000s. The best facilities management software programs include capabilities for detailed asset tracking, digital checklists, handling service requests, work order requests, and resource management. 

Despite the availability of such software, a large segment of maintenance teams has yet to make the switch to utilize facilities management software; instead of relying on manual processes, paper checklists and excel reporting.

In this article, we identify 4 common reasons for not adopting facilities management systems, typically known as Computerized Maintenance and Management Systems (CMMS). We argue that with advances in software delivery, in particular, the availability of cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery, these reasons are simply no longer valid. 

The 4 Most Common Myths of Facility Management Software

 CMMS Is Expensive

For a long time, only enterprise companies could afford online maintenance software. Acquiring a software license for an on-premise system would start from tens of thousands of dollars and all-in costs could end up in the millions.

One key reason behind the high costs is that software providers used to have to hire a small army of expensive enterprise sales staff to travel to the facilities management company to conceptualize a customized software program, decide how the system should be installed on in-house servers, and consult on the setup and implementation process. So each project required significant time and resources to implement. On top of that, organizing on-premise upgrades required substantial client interaction that increased ownership costs.

However, as the industry became more comfortable with cloud-based solutions and as new cloud-native systems emerged, the cost structure for delivering CMMS reduced drastically. Cloud-based SaaS CMMS software is intrinsically scalable. Small facilities can start with a low-cost plan, or sometimes even a free plan. Cloud-based SaaS CMMS systems can be utilized from anywhere in the world without the need to deploy on-premise servers and can literally be implemented in minutes! This means that the software providers need not hire an expensive enterprise sales force and also benefit from economies of scale. These savings are being passed on to the facilities managers. 

Cost should no longer be a barrier to CMMS implementation.

 Maintenance Management Software Is Hard to Learn

Another misconception about maintenance management software is that it is difficult to learn. That may be true for legacy CMMS as the adoption process may require significant effort to memorize complex digital workflows and may even require paid training. As a result of the cumbersome onboarding experience, many maintenance managers struggle to get their entire team on board. 

So, why are many legacy CMMS software so difficult to use? To put it simply, they were developed before the evolution of modern UI / UX design and when complex functionality took precedence over user onboarding and experience. CMMS software developers simply took it as the norm that clients must spend considerable effort to learn their software.

However, as SaaS software became prevalent with a predominantly client self-service model, CMMS SaaS software providers began to realize that ease of deployment and ease of use were necessary pre-conditions to achieve SaaS scalability. With a low-cost subscription model, not only can more long-tail clients be onboarded, they can be onboarded more quickly. Clients could self setup and self-configure, reducing the amount and time for pre-sales and the level of customer support required.

Transitions are Tough

This myth involves not only the need for learning mentioned above but also involves the assumptions that entering the necessary data, such as asset data, to get the CMMS going is time-consuming; and that the new CMMS cannot co-exist besides current processes.

Both assumptions are wrong. Data input nowadays mostly involves a one-time CSV import. Checklists can also be created from available libraries.

Modern SaaS-based cloud CMMS systems also support a gradual transition from manual to digital. Checklists can be exported to PDF for printing. Individual modules can be utilized as and when the team is ready, for example, starting with the low-hanging fruits such as fault reporting, before moving towards more data-intensive processes such as preventive maintenance.

Cloud CMMS is Not Secure

This myth exists not only for CMMS software but also for any other cloud software, including accounting and HR systems. Yet, in almost all software verticals, cloud software is gaining market share. Even in the most sensitive verticals, such as healthcare and banking, regulators have permitted the use of cloud software.

Cloud software is not by definition less secure compared to on-premise deployments. In fact, given the level of physical security at the data centers of most large cloud computing providers, cloud deployments are often more secure compared to on-premise deployments.

The correct approach in analyzing the cybersecurity of CMMS software is not to dismiss all cloud software as insecure, but to check if appropriate cloud security measures have been deployed, including physical, infrastructure, data, application, access control and endpoint security.

Maintenance Management Software Made Easy

Modern CMMS solutions like FacilityBot are leaps and bounds ahead of their early predecessors. By re-imagining how facilities management software should be, we built FacilityBot from the ground up to be affordable, user-friendly, easy to deploy, easy to use and feature-rich.  

We believe that giving the easily justifiable Return on Investment for digitizing Facilities Management processes, there should no longer be any reason for facilities managers not to use a CMMS system to manage their operations.

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Patrick Sim, Co-Founder of FacilityBot. My interests include creating a messaging-first facilities management system that facilities managers love and building other software systems.