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Facility management may not seem like a particularly complicated process at first. One of its basic definitions describe facility management as a professional management discipline that supports buildings and real estate property by creating and improving efficient services such as logistics. Facility management pursues multiple goals on a regular basis, including safety, comfort, functionality, and efficiency of the building environment.
It may not seem that complicated at first, but facility management has a surprising amount of depth and complexity to it. As such, it is not that surprising to learn that facility management as a process has industry-specific software created purely for the sake of simplifying and/or enhancing the entire process. However, the topic of Facility Management software is not as simple as that.
First of all, it is necessary to go over four different types of software that are at least somewhat relevant to facility management as a process – CMMS, IWMS, EAM, and CAFM. Computer-Aided Facility Management (CAFM) is going to be the main topic here, but knowing about other solution types is also important since they may overlap in some places.
Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) may be the most “simple” solution of the four, often regarded as the baseline in terms of capabilities and features of other solutions. CMMS has two main areas it focuses the most on – scheduling and asset maintenance. CMMS can be used to track maintenance status, schedule repairs, optimize asset uptimes, and so on.
Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) has its own share of focus areas it specializes in, including real estate management, workplace resource management, and environmental sustainability. IWMS acts great as a single source of up-to-date information on the project, making it a lot easier to streamline workflows and improve collaboration efficiency.
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) is a more case-specific software than the other three, with the main goal of performing long-term planning operations such as asset monitoring. EAM can track asset profitability, asset condition, and plenty of other parameters throughout the entire lifecycle of that asset, which makes it extremely convenient for manufacturing plants and transportation companies, among other business types.
As for Computer-Aided Facility Management (CAFM) – it can be described as an incredibly convenient way to oversee a building or structure from the standpoint of a property manager. CAFM software includes plenty of different features relevant to facility management as a process, including asset inventory, appliance usage, energy consumption, maintenance ordering, and many others.
While it is fair to say that CAFM software would be the most beneficial in the hands of a facility manager, it can also be useful to many other specialists working on the same task or project – with better operational management, more efficient resource management, etc. The same idea can be applied to entire industries, as well – asset management, space allocation, seat assignment and move management are features that can find their clients in plenty of different fields of work.
Computer-Aided Facility Management can offer a surprisingly varied set of features to its users, including, but not exclusive to the following:
- Infrastructure handling
- Lifecycle management
- Maintenance job management
- Administrative tasks
- Real estate management and leasing
- Space planning and space management
All of these features and functions are made possible by CAFM’s data-centric approach. Its most important resource is information, and no CAFM solution would be capable of performing any tasks without up-to-date information. CAFM also delves quite heavily into the ongoing trend of data analysis and data collection, offering data-driven decisions that are far more effective than what most prior solutions could offer. Some of the more modern CAFM solutions also add CAD-like features to it, greatly expanding CAFM’s capabilities in different areas (such as giving real estate agents the means of creating a virtual walkthrough of a project model while it is still in the middle of the construction).
Despite the fact that facility management software is a relatively new approach to facility management in general, there are still plenty of options to choose from. As such, it may be somewhat problematic to find a solution that fits your specific use case the most. Luckily, there are several general recommendations and advice that can be taken into account when it comes to choosing between different facility management solutions.
Figure out the main goal of this software. This particular advice is relatively common when it comes to choosing software for a specific use case, and is not particularly specific to the facility management software market – finding out what is the main goal of a facility management solution in your specific use case and situation. This is extremely important specifically for facility management because of excessive feature overlap between software types – EAC, CMMS, IWMS, and CAFM.
Research the exact set of features that you need. As an extension of the previous advice, it is also recommended to have a list of features a company expects from a future facility management solution – because each of the four software types has its own specialization, and some features may not be present in all solutions of the same category.
Be aware of different deployment options. Facility management solutions also tend to vary quite a lot when it comes to their deployment options – choosing between cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployments is not an easy process, and a specific deployment type may be preferred for a specific company or business.
At the end of the day, facility management software can be extremely useful in many situations, but only if it was picked in accordance with the company’s needs and use cases.
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