How FM business intelligence sheds new light on work order management

Posted on by Brian Prendergast

Work orders are the heart and soul of facilities management (FM). They’re the daily focus of FM energy and resources, the subject of conversations and scrutiny, and a metric by which FM performance is judged.

JLLT’s new business intelligence (BI) module for Corrigo illuminates work order performance with the Operational Insights dashboard, which gives multiple high-level views—with links to details—for quickly understanding work order volumes, costs, and overall FM performance.

Operational performance at a glance

The image below shows work order volume for 12 months. Selecting “WO Type” from the drop-down list on the right shows the ratio of preventive-maintenance (PM) work orders to reactive work orders, an essential metric of FM efficiency. Over time, PM saves more money than reactive repairs, extends the useful life of assets, and generates a higher ROI for FM operations.

For a magnified view of the image below, right click the image and select “Open image in new tab.”

The Total Cost view below plots current monthly work order volume against current monthly cost. With Cost Trends selected, it also includes year-over-year comparisons for each metric. This is an easy-to-understand visual of current and past work order spend. It informs conversations about budget compliance, a critical performance requirement for FM teams.

The Total Score view with Assignee Type selected, as shown below, enables facilities managers to compare the performance scores of internal technicians (purple line) versus external service providers (blue line). The line graphs visually trace monthly scores and provide useful information about each group’s contribution to work order management.

Business intelligence simplifies facilities management

The Operational Insights dashboard also provides links for viewing work order management details organized by property, specialty, Smart Zone (region), or assignee. The high-level and detailed views are available at the touch of a button, giving stakeholders easy access to the metrics that matters most to them.

Be sure to check out our Service Provider Insights and Asset Insights dashboards for the gains in efficiency and productivity they offer to FM teams.

Prescriptive recommendations available in all Corrigo BI dashboards enable faster and more confident decision making.

To learn more about Corrigo’s data-driven business intelligence, contact a Corrigo expert today.

Why modern facilities management needs business intelligence

Posted on by Brian Prendergast

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 business intelligence 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.

4 facilities management trends to watch in 2023

Posted on by Brian Prendergast

Software and innovative technologies continued to change—some would say disrupt—the world of facilities management (FM) in 2022. Awareness of and interest in business intelligence (BI) grew during the year as FM understaffing persisted, and shorthanded FM teams looked for ways to become more efficient and meet management expectations with less staff.

Another trend—using more third-party service providers to reduce work order volumes—also picked up steam in 2022. That’s great, but it includes a sometimes-overlooked cost. Managing a network of service providers is time intensive. Fortunately, business intelligence helps there, too, by giving insights and recommendations for effective provider management.

Here are the facilities management trends to watch in 2023, per our JLL Technologies panel of FM experts:

Trend 1: Using business intelligence to drive better FM decisions

Business intelligence (BI) enables FM teams to improve operations using data-driven metrics, insights, and prescriptive recommendations for better management of work orders, workflows, assets, and, as just mentioned, service providers.

BI algorithms and analytics enable organizations to capture a breadth and depth of insights considered unattainable a few years ago. Analyzing work order data gives unprecedented visibility into FM operations. Data available across the entire platform is ideal for setting performance benchmarks.

While data has always been vital to the role of the FM mission, today’s BI makes it push-button easy to automate, analyze, and present it to FM stakeholders. FM teams can keep working while all the data updates on schedule in real time, identifying time- and cost-savings, underperforming service providers, and assets needing replacement.

Trend 2: Investing in IoT technologies to improve asset lifecycles

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to physical devices and sensors that communicate with FM teams via the Internet. They generate performance data alerting facilities managers to potential breakdowns. FMs can monitor and control the devices from anywhere.

FM teams use IoT to provide real-time insights into their operations. IoT combined with FM software, like a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), identifies problems (e.g., uncomfortable office temperatures), and automatically creates and assigns work orders without human touch and tracks them through completion.

While IoT sensors are used for condition monitoring (e.g., motor vibration, temperature, sound, voltage, oil, etc.), other devices like beacons, RFID trackers, bar codes, and occupancy sensors can be configured to monitor security, workplace environments, inventories, materials, and location tracking.

Technologies with automation features relieve facilities managers of repetitive tasks and alert them to problems before they happen. This will be valuable in 2023 and beyond as FM teams struggle to get more done with fewer human resources.

Trend 3: Predicting analytics spots failure before it happens

Predictive analytics and its counterpart, predictive maintenance, combine preventive maintenance with innovative technologies like cloud-connected sensors and CMMSes.

Predictive maintenance can identify, estimate, and report asset failure. It can also pinpoint probable causes and suggest repair options. For example, equipment sensors and vibration analytics can detect a motor misalignment months before causing a breakdown, thereby giving the FM team time to make repairs and extend the life of the asset.

Paired with a modern CMMS, predictive analytics automatically trigger work orders when asset condition degrades. No intervention from managers is necessary. Predictive analytics also give facilities managers data-driven justification—rather than less-precise anecdotal evidence—for increasing capital budgets to prepare for future asset failure and replacement.

Studies by the U.S Department of Energy revealed that predictive maintenance is highly cost-effective in the long run, saving roughly 8%-12% over preventive maintenance and up to 40% over reactive maintenance.

Trend 4: Cost-cutting measures for mitigating inflation and business disruptions

It’s no secret that the convergence of inflation and supply chain disruptions are driving current increases in material and labor costs. FM practitioners are adopting new strategies for staying within budgets, ensuring uptime, and capturing efficiencies from technology.

Material costs are up an average of 25% compared to fourth quarter 2021. Facilities managers report that inflation, shortages, and supply chain interruptions are disrupting day-to-day facilities management as well as new construction.

To avoid the possibility of future equipment shortages and long delivery times, facilities managers (FMs) are now preordering and warehousing new equipment to be prepared for future replacements.

Service provider fuel surcharges must now be documented and calculated in accordance with relevant consumer price indices. FMs are renegotiating SLAs with providers to reflect slowdowns and shortages. Providers are bundling work orders to conserve fuel and be more efficient by fixing multiple requests on just one trip.

FMs are also leveraging software, like a CMMS, to track maintenance histories and costs to better understand how long an asset’s useful life can reasonably be extended—an essential step in maintaining uptime and managing future shortages.

The problem with inflation and related issues like supply chain disruptions is that they’re so persistent. The seven interest rate hikes in 2022 by the U.S. Federal Reserve should curb inflation, but it will take multiple quarters of economic recovery before conditions noticeably improve. This trend of closely managing costs and pursuing operational efficiencies will extend well into 2023 and likely beyond.

Next Step

To learn more about JLLT’s industry-leading FM software and how it can help keep pace with facilities management trends in 2023, talk to a Corrigo expert today.