By Tim McLean

Management teams can play a strategic role in corporate success.

Accruent offers its fifth of seven tips to helping Facilities Management teams save time, costs and energy to become a strategic contributor: Move Beyond Spreadsheets.

Move beyond spreadsheets.

You would be surprised by how many large organizations are still running major parts of their facility operations through spreadsheets. Tracking inspection records, planned maintenance, scheduled activities or asset maintenance in spreadsheets is time consuming and cumbersome. Communication with the field is often manual and is disconnected from other maintenance activities, providing silos of information to deal with. With these silos, visibility of historical results or trends is difficult, and the resulting actions by facilities teams may be disjointed or duplicated.

Sophisticated systems today allow you to schedule maintenance activities and inspections based upon specific dates, number of days since last inspection, asset usage or even building automation system alarms. The correct maintenance team can receive automatic alerts when planned maintenance approaches so that it can easily be worked into their daily activities.

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Poorly maintained assets cause energy seepage in the same way your car gets poor gas mileage when your tires aren’t inflated properly. When asserts are maintained, they operate better, they require less electricity, and they last longer. Tracking asset repair history, priority, and estimated cost is critical to cost and energy savings. Tracking this information in a single system enables you to correlate frequent repairs to high energy usage. Organizations can save significant money in annual equipment and building spending through better repair-versus-replace decisions before work actually starts. You can get out of the mode of simply fixing the systems and get into analyzing why the problems are happening.

Additional opportunities for facilities management teams.

Moving beyond spreadsheets and implementing an automated system is just one way facility maintenance management teams can play a strategic role in their company. Read previous blog posts to learn about our first four tips in the series, and stay tuned for posts on the last 2 tips to becoming a strategic contributor. Accruent’s white paper, “From Cost Center to Strategic Contributor: How Facilities Management teams Can Play a More Strategic Role in Organizations,” provides insight into how FM teams can drive profitability from their department, whether it’s leveraging automated processes or using reporting to make maintenance decisions. Download your copy of the white paper today.

Additional Information

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