FMTech Insights: How to Audit Facility Management Tasks & Services in Large Buildings
FMTech Insights is a series where subject matter experts and thought leaders in FMTech share their knowledge and opinions on the topic of their expertise; helping the industry learn, innovate and grow. The series will cover every sector in FM – from workplace management, operations and maintenance, energy management, waste management and everything in between.
Marina Rodríguez Fernández is part of the Marketing Team at Situm Indoor Positioning, which offers Workforce Management thru indoor and outdoor geolocation that enables facility managers to monitor, adjust & check fulfillment of workforce activity through geo-analytics, increase efficiency by re-assigning tasks based on location, time increase the safety of workforce and security of facilities and many more. Situm also provides indoor navigation for visitors, especially in large numbers and in venues - for sports matches, concerts and airports, etc. - find their destination in real-time and without deviations.
FMTech Insights: How to Audit Facility Management Tasks & Services in Large Buildings
Facility management services usually involve the coordination of many different tasks, which is a huge challenge that becomes even greater when these activities happen inside a large building: from shopping malls to airports, sports centres, or big corporative buildings. Indoor geolocation has proven to be a key technology to be able to audit facility management activities and make the right decisions for them to be more efficient.
Geolocation as a facility management lifesaver
An indoor geolocation system must be a multi-faceted technology: you can use it for your clients and visitors -integrating indoor navigation into your app- or to manage your activities and employees -through workforce indoor tracking and monitoring.
With Situm's indoor geolocation, this can be done with the best system accuracy, a quick deployment process and the least dedicated infrastructure needed.
In this post, we will center our focus on workforce tracking and how it is being used by Situm’s facility management clients and partners. What are the main advantages of implementing an indoor geolocation system for facility management?
1. Facilitates maintenance of facilities and equipment. Indoor positioning opens the door to task management through geolocation. The employees will be able to notify on their smartphones when they have fulfilled their tasks, creating a smooth process among the whole team. For example, a team of cleaners that work in different areas of a sports stadium can know what has been done and what hasn’t, so they can avoid duplicities or losing time on checking these details “in person”.
2. Provides useful information about the activity & use of space to optimize processes and services. Situm’s analytics feature retrieves real-time information in a simple, visual way so you can audit all your activities and make informed decisions. We will explain more about this in a little bit.
3. Better reaction to unforeseen events. Knowing where your staff is or where they are carrying out their tasks also means that, when an incident happens, you will be able to respond better and faster.
4. Better coordination between company staff and outside suppliers. An indoor location system allows you to share locations and routes with external suppliers. Access control is also reinforced by using geofences to delimit restricted areas. Avoid wasting time on indications or people getting lost, especially when the building they are in is big and complex.
5. Increase the security of the facility and its employees. Access control increases the safety of the facilities, and continuous tracking also helps determine the responsibilities. You can also implement geolocated alarms for your workforces to use in case of emergency.
6. Improve the capacity to respond to changes. The world of facility management involves constant adaptation to change in the use of space, new regulations that require capacity control, etc. Managing a large space with indoor location technology is easier and more efficient when you can easily keep everyone in the loop through their smartphones.
When looking to improve the facility management services, many companies would opt first to hire more staff or invest in new machinery rather than doing an in-depth auditing of your activities.
And Situm’s indoor geolocation allows you to do exactly that.
Auditing large spaces with indoor positioning
Before making a significant investment or hiring new people, any facility management company would need to analyze first how effective their processes currently are. Maybe check if their staff distribution or shifts are at the ideal rate of performance, or if time is being lost in unnecessary trips around the place, for example.
Do all my maintenance workers know exactly where they are required to go, or are they getting lost in paperwork or walking around looking for the next task? Do my external suppliers know the best routes inside the building for their deliveries? Are my cleaners efficiently organized according to the most trafficked areas of each floor of my building?
Indoor geolocation technology helps register all the activities to ensure full knowledge, especially significant when we are dealing with a large building such as a sports center, an airport, or a corporate building.
These places are complex because they usually employ a lot of staff that constantly moves around many rooms and corridors through several floors, including basements and parking lots that may be indoors or even combined with outdoor areas (where Situm also works!)
Situm’s system is flexible enough to adapt to any company or industry that needs to organize maintenance work and monitor the activity of its mobile staff in a large indoor space. We are currently implemented in airports, shopping malls, hotels, hospitals, etc.
Personalized analytics to know what happens in real time
Situm MRM is Situm’s monitoring system that ensures knowing all the activity happening inside (and outside!) the building in real-time. Once this information is available, managers will have all the data they need to improve the process exactly where it needs to.
Situm MRM offers different analytics, so you can retrieve all the information you need directly into the dashboard in an easy, visual way: through 3D heatmaps, trajectories, stay times, etc. Situm’s analytics feature also can include your personalized requests, so we can give you exactly the information that you need.
Complement your geolocated facility management system with indoor navigation for your visitors
We started this blog post by mentioning the two case uses of Situm’s indoor positioning technology: employee tracking and indoor navigation. Situm MRM has a great complement in indoor navigation, so you can use the same technology to improve your visitor’s experience in your building, whether it is an airport, a shopping mall, a hospital, or a hotel.
Indoor navigation solutions are also the best way to engage your visitors while helping them by implementing geomarketing techniques. This technology also helps you avoid signage costs by sending direct and updated instructions to the client’s smartphone.
If you want to know more about how to improve the facility management tasks, audit and simplify them through indoor geolocation, you can find more information on Situm’s website.
Disclaimer: the opinion of the author does not necessarily reflect that of the Global Alliance of Facility Management Innovators.
