Archive for year: 2016

As the year comes to an end you want to relax over the holidays, but, as a facilities manager, there’s a good chance you’ll spend some of your time off creating a mental to-do list of all the work orders that are going to carry over into 2017. It would be nice to start the year off with a clean slate, but facilities are complex machines that need constant attention, meaning the work orders are always coming in.

Why can’t you start with a clean slate? Why wasn’t your team able to address all of the work orders before the year ended? Your answer is most likely resources. You didn’t have the time and/or manpower to be able to address every issue. You may be under-staffed, or just swamped with work, and that’s normalized the never ending list of work orders. This is something that we deal with often – the normalization of an endless list, and people saying things such as “it’s always going to be that way”. It doesn’t have to be like this. If you had 91 extra days to address work orders, with zero new work orders coming in, could your team finish the list?

This is exactly what Fasttac was created to do. We have consistently proven with our customers that we can eliminate 25% of time spent on each work order. How? On average you spend a third of work order time looking for information. We cut this down from hours to seconds, allowing you to complete more word orders in a day. For example, if you’re like most facilities, you spend 6 hours (on average) per work order. 2 hours of this is spent searching for information. With Fasttac we cut the work order time from 6 hours to about 4 hours. So instead of completing one work order a day, you’re completing two!

Sound too good to be true? Don’t worry, we ready to prove this to you! Start by watching this 90-second video on how Fasttac works. After that, contact us and we’ll discuss exactly how Fasttac will work for your facility.

Too direct? If you’re ending the year with an “endless” list that you think is normal, then we want to be direct in telling you that we are here to help!

Saving money is always a goal for facility managers, and sometimes, it’s more than just a goal, it’s a necessity. So how do you manage a tight budget?

Unplanned Service Calls
Avoiding unplanned service calls saves big dollars, because these calls are, well, unplanned. This means that there isn’t money (specifically) set in the budget for each of these calls and that your time and attention was most likely supposed to be dedicated to something else when they occur. First thing is to make sure you have “wiggle” room in your budget for unseen maintenance needs. Second, implement systems that help mitigate unnecessary efforts, such as a help desk and call center. Help desks can supply remote facilities basic troubleshooting steps that can resolve simple issues before a work order is created. Call centers can help walk employees through simple steps and also capture more information in the event that a work order actually needs to be issued.

Set Your Price
Prearranging prices for your predictable needs (such as landscaping) will make your budget more accurate and may get you a better deal. It will also help you predicted you unpredicted costs as well. Having a set price will let you estimate extra work that will come up throughout the year. Larger facilities may benefit from having pricing guidelines (such as appropriate price points, who has the authority to override, etc.) will help you stay within your budget and control your spending.

Warranties, Warranties, Warranties
This is so important that we had to list it three times. Cashing in your warranty will help you save unnecessary spending. Best practices for documenting and tracking warranty coverages is how a facility can avoid spending money on something that is covered. Be sure that when new construction projects occur that you file and update your warranty records. Warranty management is important for all facilities, but larger facilities will naturally have more warranties to track and this can add up to a lot of savings.

As an experienced facility manager, a lot of this will come naturally to you, but if may not come naturally to your team and other staff members. Addressing these three subjects on a regular basis will help you and your facility stay organized and focused, keep you within budget and on track to success!

Well, they aren’t literally in the clouds, however, in terms of how they use the technology they are “in the cloud”. What’s the cloud? In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive of on a local server. The cloud is basically a term commonly used to refer to the internet.

So why are facility managers going to the cloud? What benefit does it give them?

Support

Cloud-based technologies are offered as a service. You may hear the term SaaS (Software as a Service) and this model often includes (or offers) a support package for the software. This means that you no longer have to worry about servers crashing or restarting, all of the technical back-end overhead is taken care of for you! This also means that you can focus on the tasks that are important to your role, not keeping supporting third party software.

Security

It’s very important to properly vet your vendors and make sure that they operate securely. Once you do that you’ll find that the vendors that do operate securely are often able to provide a level of security beyond what you can provide internally. This also helps simplify your disaster recovery plan. You’re not responsible for backing up and restoring the data, this falls onto the vendor.

Access From Anywhere

Your facility is big, your desk is not. Your job doesn’t keep you tied down to your desk so your software shouldn’t either. Cloud-based technologies are often able to be used on any device, including web browsers, tablets, and smartphones. This means that you can do your job and use the tools you need at any time, at any location, on any device.

Facilities that use cloud-based technologies can increase workforce and operational efficiencies. These facilities can achieve 25% more efficiency, meaning that they save time and money every single day. The convenience and strong ROI is hard to ignore, so the question is, will you move your facilities applications to the cloud?

Campus facilities are an important part of any college and university experience, but in recent years higher education has been faced with shrinking budgets, smaller grants, and fighting to keep tuition increases at a minimum – meaning that facility managers are faced with the task of keeping up with their growing facility costs as the budget gets smaller.

This challenge is not an easy one to tackle, and facility managers at these institutions have been dealing with them for well over a decade. The facilities costs for a public university have grown over 20% in the past ten years, and that’s only going to continue to grow. So what can be done to help manage this paradox?

Data Collection
Having accurate and updated data is essential for your systems to work and for you to make the right decisions. Take the initiative to collect data on your buildings, equipment, assets, etc. so that you are working with the right details.

Replace Legacy Systems
Do you have old-school CAD data? Do you have rolls of drawings still laying around? Are the books of logs? Anything that you are doing now that was done in the 70’s most likely needs an update. Take advantage of digital information and systems that can save you time and money.

Process Improvements
Do you have to different places for asset data? How do you track changes to the facility? Minimizing the places that you store information and the different processes required to work with that data will help improve efficiency and give you a simpler process. When there are simpler, more efficient processes, the result for the facility manager and their team is indirect cost recovery, better planning, and better insight into your facility’s needs!