With reporting becoming more important to businesses these days, it brings up a valid question: What do we do with it all? After all, collecting data only serves as one piece of the puzzle. Data includes any quantitative information, such as how many hours a technician spends on preventive maintenance per month, or the number of work orders that you opened for a quarter. Putting some analysis behind the data turns it into information, and that gives you the insight you need in your business to make decisions that drive efficiency.

For instance, capturing the number of hours one technician spends on reactive vs. preventive maintenance in a month serves as a good indication of how that person is spending their time. It can help you determine if they need a more balanced workload, or if they have too much on their plate.

When you track the number of hours across your entire team and turn it into an average amount of time spent between the two, you can truly gauge the current state of your organization. Not spending enough time on preventive maintenance? Use the information to create an action plan to transform how your team works. Information can go much deeper than simply providing insight on how you can shift your team’s time. When it comes to asset management, for instance, it can help your team make strategic decisions that impact your organization’s bottom line.

For instance, if you didn’t have a CMMS solution in place to track all details related to your assets, how would you make the decision that it needs to be replaced? Most often, this comes from the perception that the machine is problematic, which can be developed simply by a technician mentioning a few times that there are reactive maintenance requests on it. Without any indication of how severe the requests are or how often they occur, it can be easy to assume that it needs to be replaced.

In terms of asset management, data points can be tracked across the board, including:

  • Number of reactive maintenance requests.
  • Costs associated with reactive maintenance requests.
  • Number of preventive maintenance requests.
  • Current value based on depreciation.
  • Approximate life.

When turning this data into information, you can understand whether or not it makes sense for your organization to continue to repair the asset or replace it with something new, which has the opportunity to drastically cut costs and improve the overall operations of your building.

Collecting data points serves as a start to gaining insight and visibility into the performance of your real estate and facilities portfolio, down to the granular level of how much time a technician spends on a work order. However, to truly gain the benefits from the new age of reporting, you need to transform it into information – and leverage what that tells you to drive strategic success from the core of your organization.