By Brian Prendergast

Why modern facilities management needs business intelligence

The projected exodus of 40% of the existing facilities management (FM) workforce by 2026 anticipates 158,000 open FM positions, which may not be filled until the end of this decade.

Business intelligence (BI), along with the metrics, insights, and prescriptive recommendations it generates, can help understaffed teams boost their productivity to keep up with increasing work order volumes.

If you’re a facilities manager with reduced staff, a high percentage of break-fix repairs, too much data from your FM software, and no idea how to use it, you now have five solid reasons for why BI is right for your FM operations.

1. It would take an FM team weeks to crunch the data that BI generates in minutes

BI algorithms do the hard work of connecting thousands of FM data points and presenting the metrics that matter in easy-to-understand dashboards with insights available to all FM stakeholders.

No need for FM teams to dig through mountains of data, extract results, analyze them, and present them. And then do it all over again weeks later. BI does it automatically on any schedule.

Without BI, modern FM teams struggle to keep up with work orders, service providers, and asset maintenance. With BI, they have access to the essential performance metrics that drive productivity even while being shorthanded.

2. BI helps FM teams better manage third-party service providers

Sophisticated BI algorithms go beyond describing vendor performance by identifying underperforming and/or over-priced providers and giving recommendations for either renegotiating their contracts or switching providers altogether. Either response yields near-immediate cost savings at the time of the first or next invoice, thereby boosting financial performance.

The Service Provider Insights dashboard inside Corrigo’s business intelligence module also ranks service providers by total score and half dozen other metrics and pinpoints local markets yielding the greatest potential savings.

3. BI prepares FM teams to prevent or mitigate downtime

Facilities managers ensure greater uptime by taking advantage of BI recommendations for replacing aging assets. For example, the Asset Insights dashboard inside Corrigo identifies a customer’s 10 lowest-performing assets and includes a schedule for when they should be replaced.

BI gives FM teams early warning about asset failure and enables them to be better prepared. Readiness is an FM imperative, a critical component of team performance, and an expectation of the FM job role. Without BI, understaffed FM teams struggle to satisfy all three.

4. You need accurate FM data for your budgets

Before BI, facilities managers were unable to analyze months of data pulled from multiple sources to justify million-dollar budgets. The result was underfunded budgets. With BI, however, FMs have solid numbers from one centralized database to advocate for the funding their FM operations deserve.

The historical view of FM as a cost center creates a necessity for cost containment. That’s difficult to achieve without BI dashboards offering visibility into work orders, vendors, assets, and workflows—collectively, the variables that can be optimized for time- and cost-savings.

BI data informs budgets, illuminates overspending, and spotlights workflow bottlenecks where simple streamlining would save time to free up FM teams for higher priority work. BI delivers a bundle of benefits and raises the role of FM from cost center to value-driver.

5. Data-driven metrics lead to better FM decisions

BI justifies the replacement of aging assets with data, like maintenance histories and costs, useful life, book values, and market benchmarks.

A data-driven approach stands in sharp contrast to traditional FM processes for justifying asset replacement or setting not-to-exceed limits for work orders. In both cases, decisions were often arbitrary and based on personal experience, which were difficult to defend and impossible to scale.

Business intelligence is a sophisticated tool ready right now—perhaps just in time—to help FM teams capture time and cost savings at scale and pursue greater productivity. The data from millions of work orders fuels the insights that would otherwise be beyond the reach of diminished FM teams.

Discover how BI drives better decisions and FM performance

BI enables confident decision making based on large data sets and sophisticated, interconnected algorithms. They produce the deep insights FM teams could never uncover on their own but need for increased efficiency and long-term success.

To learn more about business intelligence for your FM operations, visit our Business Intelligence solutions page or contact a Corrigo expert.