The importance of facilities management software should be self-evident, but there are some subtleties to the tools available that go unnoticed
Of course, facilities management is important for responding to work orders. It’s important to track the equipment that you have on-site. If you don’t maintain the equipment properly, you’ll have:
- Increased costs of ownership
- Equipment that fails more often
- Major unplanned capital replacements
All of those issues eat away at profits, and they’re things people don’t think about.
If you have bad facilities management, you’ll probably have unhappy tenants. So, satisfied residents often go hand-in-hand with a facility that’s really well maintained.
It’s hard to maintain a facility proactively without software to drive and track the maintenance that needs to be done. Software tools can also track work orders and make sure they’re done in a timely fashion. It also tracks the assets on site, the equipment you have, and when they need to be replaced.
Bringing all of that to bear in facilities management software can increase resident satisfaction, which is what every property owner is after. And a well-maintained facility is a safer facility for your employees and the residents or the tenants of that facility.
Safety & Risk Mitigation in Facilities Management
Safety is important. Reducing risk is also important. That includes reducing operational risk, reducing property liability risk, and reducing your risk of not completing operational tasks. There’s also the risk of losing out on potential income because your assets aren’t marketed properly, or leasing isn’t being done properly. So those aspects as well are important for facilities management.
There are a number of really key features that any good facilities management software will have. What underpins it all is processes for managing work orders, managing preventative maintenance, tracking the condition of on-site equipment.
Managing Work Orders
First, you need to be able to receive work orders from either residents or from tenants and process those. You need to be able to track the amount of time it takes to complete those.
Hopefully, depending on the kind of software you’re using, maybe you can generate POS out of that process. Perhaps even order some parts and supplies to facilitate the work order. Those are some, I think really key pieces of any good facilities management software.
Managing Preventative Maintenance
Your facilities maintenance software should also manage your preventative maintenance. Your software should be able to build schedules for every piece of equipment. And those schedules should include both dates and tasks to complete.
The ability to do that varies greatly, however, among different types of facilities management software. It’s one of the things you should look at when evaluating the software you want to adopt. Some of them require an individual schedule to be built for every single piece of equipment at every single property, and they’re all unique.
Leonardo247 takes a different approach. Once you establish the kinds of maintenance you want on a piece of equipment and we know which properties have that equipment, we automatically generate those schedules. It’s a different point of view, but one way or another, a preventative maintenance schedule should be in place for everything at your property.
Tracking On-Site Equipment Conditions
Asset tracking is a big piece. That starts with the equipment you have, the model, and when it was installed. What its replacement cost is. What its useful life is. That will allow you to generate capital schedules. It’ll allow you to generate depreciation schedules for you filing your taxes. So equipment asset tracking is important.
Having the ability to control workflows is an important element of your processes too. If there’s a certain way you want something done, the right processes make sure that it’s done the right way, at the right time, every time.
Good facilities management software will allow you to create a process. And when your staff needs that process, they just call it up, launch the process, and follow the guidance provided by the software. The process is thorough and the data they capture is easily available for projecting costs, or risk, or failure.
If your facilities management software can do other things, like POS or vendor management, that’s like icing on the cake. You can manage your vendors and issue POS or even request proposals through the software.
Those are ‘nice-to-haves,’ but not ‘must-haves.’ That said, it’s really hard to find a facility management software that does all of those things really well at a price point that is attractive to most people.
Advanced Options for Facilities Management Software
There are some really advanced facilities management apps and tools that cost a lot of money. In multifamily, frankly, that kind of expenditure might not be reasonable. And there are really good options at a lower price point that are easier to set up, faster to set up, that might be preferable for some operators.
One of the tricks to getting the most out of any facilities management software is setting it up properly. And most software companies either leave that up to the client or charge a lot of money to get involved in the setup.
At Leonardo247, we have a different approach. Making sure that clients are successful with Leo out of the box is essential to our mission.
Implementation & Account Management
Our implementation and account management teams work to understand what each clients’ policies, procedures, and maintenance schedules are.
We read policy manuals and propose how to integrate them in Leonardo247. Our teams review your boilers’ maintenance schedule, for example, to see if they are complete and up-to-date.
Our under-the-hood view of the best multifamily operators means that we can communicate what general best practices are. So even if you don’t have a complete preventative maintenance program at your company already, we can help to put those processes in place during onboarding.
Task & Procedure Library
Leonardo247 has a library of out-of-the-box inspections, procedures, tasks, and workflows that clients can choose from if they don’t have them in place already. Or if they have an existing process but like ours better, they can use ours instead.
One of the keys is our consultative approach. Leonardo247 isn’t just a piece of software that you turn on and walk away from. The relationship doesn’t end when the software is launched, and we really try to convey that.
Our account managers stay with those accounts, monitor those accounts. We watch for missed inspections and other issues that need to be addressed. We’re there to help.
Applying Facility Management Software to COVID-19
When COVID-19 became an issue, we were the first to call our clients and suggest using Leonardo247 for rent relief tracking and deferred rent requests. It was also useful for tracking employees with high temperatures at work and giving data to the corporate office on that front.
If we run across best practices that you haven’t implemented already, our account managers will raise their hand and bring that to your attention. We want to be the partner that helps you be the best operator you can be. That starts with your own policies and procedures, which can be backstopped by what we know other companies are doing and best practices in the industry.
We watch where the industry is headed. We do that both for our own business and our clients. The combination of those things should make Leonardo247 the best operational partner available for facility managers.
Facilities Management Software That Works
We strive to be experts with the most knowledge and the best processes. That way we can lay out what we know for our clients and they can choose to use or not use our recommendations.
We stay focused on the end result — a process that runs your properties the way you want, based on best practices in the industry.