5 ways facilities management software can reduce costs

Any business owner knows that the ongoing maintenance and facility management of buildings and assets can cause a financial headache. From unexpected repairs to faulty machinery as well as safety and general maintenance – there’s a lot to juggle. And for multi-site operators, the logistics can get complicated – fast!

Computer Aided Facility Management (CAFM) software enables businesses to tighten their processes and reduce the cost of manual tasks, identify pain points that are costing money and ensure a more efficient contractor process.

Find out five ways facilities management software could reduce maintenance costs by at least 10%:

1. Free up time

One of the most effective ways you can start to save costs in your business is by reducing the time spent on manual tasks and processes. Managing property and maintenance repair tasks can take a significant amount of time, from sourcing contractors to getting quotes, finding time slots for booking work in and generating a lot of paperwork in invoices and payment requests.

And if you’re constantly having to source new contractors based on availability – the quality of work being carried out may be inconsistent – meaning you have to arrange more call-outs and lose more time.

Facilities management software makes managing these tasks much more efficient. Your system can be populated with pre-approved contractors to remove the time spent sourcing them, you can monitor and track tasks and their status to achieve quicker resolutions, invoices and purchasing can be done directly within the system.

By utilising computer-aided facility management software you can significantly reduce the time spent on sourcing, organising and contacting contractors – freeing up your team’s valuable time.

2. Data analysis

Another benefit of a computer-based facilities management system is that you can analyse data, at site level and across your estate to identify areas that are costing you more money. That might be identifying a particular asset or issue that has generated repeated call-outs or even identifying where an alternative contractor could have been used to save costs. This valuable data will allow you visibility over all sites and over prolonged periods of time so you can identify and resolve those pinch points and save money in the long term.

And you can also manage your budgets and control expenditure for facility management which will help you identify which sites are going over budget and the reasons why.

3. Predictive maintenance planning

While dealing with reactive maintenance i.e. waiting for an issue to develop before responding to it, is unavoidable, predictive maintenance planning can save your operation a substantial amount of money by helping to identify problems early and keeping your site and assets safe for use.

There are several ways that predictive maintenance planning can help you save costs:

• Consistent predictive maintenance will prolong the life of assets saving you money in both repairs and replacements.
• Issues that aren’t identified early can drain on resources in the meantime or even lead to bigger and more costly repairs over time.
• Unresolved unidentified issues may be presenting a safety risk that you’re not aware of and lead to being non-compliant with legal regulations.

Your CAFM system can help you budget for, plan and schedule the regular maintenance that will help you control costs long-term and ultimately lead to fewer emergency repairs and call-outs being necessary.

4. Contractor management

It’s not just time you will save with a CAFM system, improving the efficiency of property repairs and maintenance will significantly reduce spend on maintenance. Within the software you can offer pre-approved, correctly certified contractors and also measure against specific contractor KPIs, meaning more first-time fixes from your call-outs.

The system also improves communication between site and contractor, with pictures, additional information and restricted access times, highlighted ahead of the planned work so that engineers are better informed before they even arrive on-site – leading to quicker resolutions and fewer call-outs.

5. Supply only procurement

Imagine a streamlined system to help you manage your goods, parts and assets in facility management as well as the maintenance of your buildings. Your CAFM system can help you keep track of all your ongoing facilities and asset procurement – saving hours of time in sourcing stockists. And you can also help control costs by ensuring that repairs under warranty are correctly served by digitalising your paper-based systems. You’ll also have complete visibility of which assets are costing the most in repairs or being reordered the most.

When it comes to technology solutions many businesses may overlook their facilities management processes, certainly, it doesn’t directly deliver sales or profit through revenue generation. But this frequent misconception may well be costing your business big time. When it comes to presenting a case for a CAFM software system consider the benefits outlined in this article and consider the following questions:

• Do you have maintenance budgets in place (reactive and planned) across the estate?
• Do you regularly seek additional quotes for remedial work carried out on site?
• How do you currently authorise additional work carried out over and above initial tasks carried out on site?
• Can you accurately verify how long contractors were on site and how that relates to the invoice that you receive?
• On average, how many maintenance invoices are you required to consolidate/process on a monthly basis?

Ready to take the next step towards the future of facilities management? Check out this guide ‘Effective Facilities Management and the returns it brings'.

Find out more about facilities management software.