With the ever-changing workplace structure, continuous digitization, environmental issues, and other factors, the facilities are changing, thus also the building operations management practices have to evolve to meet these new demands.
What are facility services? Facility services are responsible for the efficiency, functionality, safety, maintenance, and all other operations that encompass a building's ability to its occupier.
Moreover, 45.1% of all facility managers state that their main objective is to improve efficiency.
With the overall responsibility, building facility management is a cross-functional business that maximizes the span of the built environment and its assets by reducing costs through enhanced productivity, safety, etc.
Strategic measures are vital in today’s competitive world where businesses and individual organizations are continuously progressing.
Effective facility management ensures that the work environment is a safe and secure place to work and that employees have access to their required skills.
To provide a good environment, you need good lighting, ventilation, heating and cooling, lighting work safety, ventilation and heating and cooling of the work environment and the facility services employees can cope with.
How a building looks can influence your professional reputation and reliability.
A well-maintained building can help improve the perspective of your brand image, culture at work, and employee satisfaction level. Not to mention it will attract customers, clients, and business partners who will get more than simply the immediate operational aspects of the facility.
This post is well-researched and compiled to help you optimize building operations management for a competitive edge and sustained growth of your business.
Let’s start.
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Building Operations Management
Building Operations Management, in simple terms, is the systematic oversight, coordination, and optimization, of day-to-day activities within an operation for overall success.
The operation at hand is the role of the Building and its internal/external environments.
These solutions are automated centrally controlled systems for managing the core functional aspects of a building, ranging from heating, lighting ventilation, energy, air conditioning, security, and even skin management on some bigger multi-site operations.
Key Components of Building Operations
- Maintenance – Routine care and servicing of building components to prevent decay and prolong the life of a structure (preventive maintenance).
- Security – Measures are taken to protect a building or facility, including the contents, systems, and occupants, to preserve resources against theft, fire, flood, or other hazards.
- Cleaning – All activities necessary to maintain a controlled, sanitary, and efficient environment within building facilities.
- Space Utilization – The efficient use of space in a building by strategic planning and organizing of furniture, technology, equipment, and working employees so renters will get the most out of their investment.
Technology Integration in Modern Building Management
Integrating technology plays a pivotal role in maximizing building operations within the current landscape of facility management. Using software like Xenia streamline tasks, manage work orders, and maintain effective communication between all components of a facility.
From toolbox talks to SDS (Safety Data Sheet) management to preventive maintenance scheduling - instead of many tools and manual processes, Xenia puts it all in one place.
With Xenia, tracking work orders is seamless.
Users can create, assign, and manage work orders across teams – all via a unified dashboard. Real-time notifications and updates mean stakeholders are always informed, reducing the need for constant queries. Results can be reviewed, analyzed, and shared easily through our PDF, CSV, and URL export functions.
Managers can schedule, assign, and manage comprehensive preventative maintenance schedules for your entire organization. Designed with an eye on safety, Xenia guarantees your equipment receives the preventative maintenance attention it needs, accounting for safety equipment.
Audits and inspections are an important part of safety compliance and Xenia addresses them efficiently.
The mobile-first application allows you to do audits on mobile devices, keep an end-to-end audit log for accountability, and generate company-branded reports, so getting audited is just a bit less painful. Moreover, you can capture images, make notes, or create corrective actions while doing inspections as well so you can be even more thorough in your safety assessments.
Moving on, Xenia makes inspections and audits more powerful by creating tasks immediately from failed steps. The login dashboard provides a quick view of corrective actions requiring completion so you can easily determine the status of pending work. Smart logic automation in the unified Corrective and Preventive Action (CAPA) technologies enhances problem-solving and resolution providing a robust proactive approach to customers.
With robust asset management tools, users can record assets in great detail, including sub-assets, attaching serial numbers, purchase dates, and manuals--information that’s often difficult to retrieve when it’s needed.
We take full advantage of a small technology tidbit—QR Codes—that provides lightning-fast access to asset histories. Imagine the productivity gains realized through quick access to asset information during repairs or maintenance.
Importance of Building Operations Management
- Enhance Energy Management
Building operations management allows you to better manage energy within a building hence improving its efficiency.
There is better control of lighting and heating. Buildings are normally fitted with uncontrolled heating, cooling, and lighting systems but through facilities operations management it is possible to control individual zones of a building to meet specific requirements.
It is possible to program your building such that only areas with people consume energy. It is estimated that you can manage to save 5-30% on your energy bills by efficiently using these facilities.
- Improved Security
Building facility management can be customized to cater to the specific security requirements of the premises.
The programming can provide conditional access to authorized people only.
The solutions can provide events with alarms in case there is danger or security breach. There are intelligent filters that can avoid false alarms and keep non-critical events away from genuine security matters which has urgency. The solutions can efficiently manage and control the outside parking lights, security cameras including CCTVs, and the lighting in the building to provide more security to the occupants.
- Simplifies Building Maintenance
Effective building operations management also simplifies building maintenance.
They allow building operators to detect problems early on and therefore save costs and effort.
They are designed to collect data at regular intervals in each of the various building zones so that building managers can easily review them and take appropriate action. In addition, thanks to a secure Internet connection, relevant data can be accessed remotely, allowing the building operator to have a look at it from anywhere.
Building Facility Management
What are facility management services? Building Facility Management (FM) encompasses multiple disciplines to ensure functionality, comfort, safety, and efficiency of the built environment by integrating people, place, process, and technology.
Building FM is a discipline focused on the efficient and effective delivery and support of strategic, tactical, and operational objectives through the integration and use of people, processes, knowledge, systems, and technology. It combines multiple disciplines to ensure functionality, comfort, safety, and efficiency of the built environment.
Overview of Facility Management Services
- Maintains overall cleanliness and hygiene of the facility and the surroundings.
- Implementing security measures to safeguard the facility, the well-being of employees, the building itself, and its assets.
- Planning site layouts for buildings and services in terms of space allocation and facilities layout.
- Implementing environmentally friendly practices, including waste recycling, reclamation, and pollution control.
- Maintaining and managing equipment and infrastructure for the facility to operate.
Benefits of Good Facility Management
- High occupancy and satisfaction rates depend on the positive experience occupants have. That experience can be impacted by well-maintained, organized, safe, and secure facilities.
- Strategic planning and proactive maintenance combined with ongoing performance analysis and measurement of systems will keep your buildings running at peak performance and reliability.
- Take actions to avoid repairs and you’ll save money. Repair costs will be lower and you’ll save on energy costs, too. Overall, you’ll become more cost-efficient.
Challenges and Solutions to Building Facility Management
1. Unplanned Expenses
Unscheduled periodic maintenance needs result in a significant blow to the operating budget and often do not fit into the facility management cost outlay, as executed during the construction phase.
Also, weather influences infrastructure, overuse of the facilities, inadequate housekeeping, and misuse often result in the potential failure of the facilities’ infrastructure, and the inability of the facility to have routinely checked to ascertain any maintenance requirements results in faults that enforce unscheduled maintenance that will directly increase the operating costs.
Solution
Businesses must employ professional facility managers who have an understanding of building maintenance and who can put measures in place that are essential to keeping the facility operational such as the checking of buildings and facilities. Qualified facility managers can make certain that tests are conducted on the efficiency and durability of the building equipment to guarantee work is uninterrupted.
2. Multitasking and Coordinating Teams
One of the biggest complaints of building operations management is streamlining the multitasking and coordinating teams. Companies that still rely on manual methods of reporting failures and adequately documenting other operational processes tend to have more issues with this.
Solution
You need to determine if you want to adopt a centralized cloud-based facility management software or other automated tools and apps for communication to allow a constant flow of communication and to streamline the organization, innovation, knowledge sharing, and productivity.
With these tools, you can automate failure reporting and inventory management and generate automatized reports as well making facility management an easier job.
Most of the facility managers are bombarded with jobs.
So you need to give them some tools in their hands to allow them to be over the top of things.
For example, one of the tools you can use to allow multi-tasking capability and team coordination would be a digital calendar. You can use those calendars to simply tell both workers on the floor and the managers, who are having maintenance responsibility tomorrow.
By telling this via a digital calendar, you are allowing managers and workers to plan their workloads.
3.Poor Time Mangement
Building facility management is a highly dynamic field. Managers have to micromanage many activities in a single day i.e. coordinating teams, attending to emergency calls, meetings, vendor consultations, and customer support, and many more of the same type. The reason is these activities mostly require managing the workforce within the facility.
Without having access to real-time data creates many problems in facility management. You cannot immediately ask for a job as you don’t know where your employee is or how his shift is scheduled and secondly, you cannot plan or prioritize the jobs.
Solution
Automated employee tracking software helps facility managers to deliver better facility management.
Our software provides the facility of employee attendance and tracking system with geofencing and GPS targeting systems. It is a complete solution for workforce attendance and shift management.
In shifts, the employees are at the destined location, and facility managers get reports for overtime, absenteeism, leave, and shift schedule efficiency automatically which makes facility management more authenticated.
4. Equipment Maintenance
Damage to facility buildings and equipment is bound to happen. The facilities might need replacing at some point or another.
Proper measures of maintenance should be taken to prevent damage and of course always hesitant in purchasing old gear and facilities to prevent any severe damage. Poor maintenance of equipment results in a management nightmare with the cost of restoring the facility exceeding your budget for the year.
Without Planned maintenance, facilities can often fall into disrepair, which can affect the habitability of the facility.
Solution
To keep maintenance costs within the range of the budgeted amount, prevent and or fix problems in a timely, and prepare for downtime facility managers must plan for ways to extend the life of their assets as facilities and equipment age and develop complications.
Role of Facility Management Services in Bussiness Growth
- Building facility management ensures optimal use of physical space, resources, and assets, leading to streamlined operations and improved productivity.
- The implementation of sophisticated technology improves communication, work management, and overall operational efficiency.
- Technology Integration: Implementation of advanced technologies enhances communication, task management, and overall operational efficiency.
- Facility management ensures that buildings satisfy safety standards, lowering the risk of accidents and legal fines.
- Compliance with sustainability standards not only meets the criteria, but also contributes to corporate social responsibility, therefore improving the company's reputation.
- Janitorial services help to keep the workplace clean and healthy, which improves employee well-being and morale.
- Implementing strong security measures creates a safe and comfortable working environment, boosting employee confidence and happiness.
- Efficient space usage improves the workplace's overall structure and functionality, fostering cooperation and innovation.
Future Industry Trends in Facility Management
IoT and Smart Technology
Finally, with Internet of Things (IoT) technology, property management software, building systems, and anything else with a power switch all communicate data over the Internet.
That data can be used to automate a lot of the more burdensome maintenance work, proactively plan maintenance work, and keep maintenance work connected even when they are in the field.
Improved Decision Making
Analyzing more data and more accurate data means making more informed decisions. An increased access to data means less decision-making based on intuition, hunches, or schedules, and more decisions based on information. Facility management teams can wring more value out of their resources, and make optimal operational decisions.
AI and Automation
The US AI market is expected to reach approximately $300 billion by 2026.As technology grows so does AI.
Our workplace is gradually starting to implement robot workers and automated processes. Although more AI could mean a decrease in labor costs, it generally increases efficiency and productivity for human labor that operates machinery rather than completely replacing those workers.
Increased Mobility
With the amount of data that can be transmitted using internet connectivity, FM teams are compelled to find innovative data-retribution ways.
This can be achieved by using mobile apps that are connected to their FM and CMMSs to do tasks such as log reports, look at user manuals, and follow maintenance plans whilst being out on the field.
Many of these trends feed off one another too, for example, IoT technologies feed off into data-based decision-making and increased mobility.
Wrapping It Up
Building operations management includes strategic planning, maintenance services, and all the other necessary work needed for a business to function.
Organizing the company, making sure that things are up to code, and creating a work environment necessary to function, help companies reach their full potential.
Some of the best practices in facility management include preventive maintenance, emergency preparedness and response planning, and continuous improvement processes.
These all help ensure your building will be able to do what it is meant to do and outlast the rest. In addition to ensuring the success of the business, facility best practices also help to ensure occupant comfort and safety.
Rapid growth in the global investment in internet technology is expected to reach $1.2 trillion by 2022, at a 13.6% compound annual growth rate.
As enterprises across diverse sectors continue to adopt digital transformation they require sophisticated facility management solutions. Advanced software designed for facility management enables businesses to effectively manage resources, streamline processes, and derive maximum utilization of assets.
Facility professionals should be exploring modern tools like Xenia to navigate the new landscape of facility management. Xenia offers a work order tracking capability and an inspection with corrective action capability.
This can help facility professionals identify trends through key performance measurements. Xenia ensures facility professionals are at the forefront of the evolving world of facility management, driving sustainability, efficiency, and resilience in building operations.
Unify Team Operations, Maintenance and Safety Compliance with Xenia
Xenia unifies daily operations, maintenance management and quality assurance to help ensure teams and facilities are effective and efficient.
Our customers love Xenia's robust use cases including:
Operational Execution
✔️ Checklists & SOPs
Create checklists, SOPs, Inspections and Data Logs to power accountability, training and staff clarity on every task.
💪 Team Task Management
Assign work digitally to defeat pencil whipping and disorganized teams. Complete tasks, chat with teams on any device, track time, collect photos, and ensure high quality work.
📆 Recurring Tasks
Create recurring schedules for daily opening and closings, performance review meetings, inspections, cleanings and more.
📲 Chats & Announcements
Centralize team communications with in task chats, one-on-one chats, team messages and company wide announcements
📊 Team Performance Reporting
Use Xenia's analytics dashboards to view staff work reports. Filter by asset, location, category or due date and export the report in PDF or Excel
Maintenance Management
🛠️ Work Orders
Create work orders with associated team, asset, location, priority, category and due date. View live progress reports on each work order, chat with teams, and review resulting template submission, images and notes to improve operations.
🧰 Preventive Maintenance
Create a preventive maintenance calendar to ensure asset uptime is not compromised. Attach images, templates, videos and notes to every task and assign to a team or individual for completion.
📲 QR Codes
Generate and attach QR codes to equipment and facility locations to enable fast and accurate inspections and data logs.
⚙️ Work Order Requests
Receive, approve and assign work order requests from tenants, regular customers and vendors. Enable requesters to submit, track, and communicate with your team, without access to operations templates or unrelated work orders.
📁 Equipment Work History
View work history for every asset and sub asset in Xenia. Review performance data and enable corrective actions to improve your operation.
Safety Compliance & Quality Assurance
👍 Concrete Brand Standards
Put your brand standards in a clear and operational checklist to be attached to work assignments.
🔎 Smart Inspection Workflows
Xenia's operations template builder has built in conditional logic into each step. This allows you to trigger actions based on a form response such as creating a corrective action on a failed inspection step, sending a notification to management for out of range meter readings, and much more.
✨ Corrective Actions
Operationalize inspections with fast work order assignment arising from a failed inspection step. All corrective data is stored in the checklist submission for auditing and accountability.
📋 Analytics and Reports
View live dashboard summaries of tasks, employee performance, template submissions and more. Filter, organize and export compliance reports to PDF and Excel formats to simplify compliance management.
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