Whether you’re managing a sporting venue, concert arena, or convention center, it’s important to do everything you can to keep the asset in tip-top shape and ensure that guests and employees are safe.
By doing so, organizations can unlock the full potential of their facilities, creating happy employees and loyal customers who will support them for years to come.
To accomplish this, many smart organizations prioritize facility management. Keep reading to learn more about what facility management is, why it matters, and what the future of facility management looks like.
What is facility management?
Facility management is the process of supporting and maintaining the functionality of commercial real estate assets—including buildings, property, and infrastructure—to improve and optimize guest and employee experiences.
In addition to physical asset management, facility management also includes lease management, energy management, capital project planning and management, emergency management and business continuity, and more.
What responsibilities are part of facility management?
Ultimately, facility management aims to empower teams to do their best work while giving guests the support they need to have the best experiences possible every time they enter your facilities.
To do this, facility managers create processes and standard operating procedures (SOPs) that workers can follow to increase the chances the organization’s goals are met and desired outcomes are achieved. By creating proven processes and sticking to them, it’s much easier for staff to keep facilities in great condition.
Facility management also involves powering operations with technology. For the best results, facility managers should consider purpose-built maintenance management systems. At the same time, they should also follow best practices instead of starting from scratch and trying to reinvent the wheel.
What are the benefits of facility management?
There’s a reason leading organizations invest heavily in facility management: those investments return tremendous dividends.
For starters, facility management helps organizations save considerable sums of money. Instead of waiting for things to break and then fixing them, facility management enables companies to prioritize preventative maintenance, keeping their assets in great shape at lower cost. What’s more, people are less likely to get hurt due to a hazard when facilities are in good condition. Additionally, facility management enables effective space management, which can deliver cost savings of up to 30 percent.
With the right tools and technologies in place, organizations can bake considerably more efficiency into every capital project they pursue. According to McKinsey, this can translate into a 45 percent reduction in project costs. This makes it easier to build out and expand new and existing facilities; it also makes it easier to generate ROI on each project.
On top of this, nicer facilities bring out the best in your employees. When given the chance, would you prefer working in a state-of-the-art facility or one that looks like it was built 50 years ago? By making facility management a priority, you can increase employee engagement while reducing absenteeism. With a digital system in place, employees won’t have to spend time searching for information either, enabling them to reclaim time and accomplish more.
What does the future of facility management look like?
Though facility managers will always need teams of people at each facility, the future of facility management will include more remote workers and hybrid environments. To support these distributed teams, facility managers will need to invest in consolidated tech platforms that give them all the tools they need to do their best work through a single pane of glass.
This is all possible with a robust computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), which also gives facility managers the information they need to make data-driven decisions.
To learn more about what the future of facility management looks like, check this out.
Where do you stand with facility management?
Facility management needs to be a top priority for any organization that manages commercial real estate properties, buildings, and infrastructure. That said, there’s no reason to make it any harder than it needs to be.
To learn more about how you can transform your approach to facility management with 24/7 Software, request a demo today.
