Although their operations are generally smaller than in industry, facility managers working in K-12 schools, hospitals/clinics, and medical distribution centers also have a lot of responsibilities on their shoulders. One is to keep equipment, buildings, vehicles, and machinery up and running at all times.
All of these assets tend to have a lifecycle and will invariably fail or cease to function. Many facility managers work with a “break and fix” routine; that is, some reactive maintenance only when any problem appears.
But proper asset management can extend the equipment’s useful life and avoid emergency repair costs and downtime. Asset Performance Management (APM) are processes that allow you to monitor, assess, maintain and finance your facility’s most needed assets. Understand the benefits of proper management and how asset performance management software can make your day-to-day easier and save time and money for the organization.
The Value of Assets
Imagine some essential assets necessary for your facility to operate daily: the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system, for example.
Now try to remember all the decisions that this particular equipment has required of you and your team, from purchase to implementation, through maintenance services already performed, repairs in the face of more serious damage, etc.
All of this took time, money, and a lot of attention. Now multiply that by a full facility and you will understand the true value of the assets and their need to be updated on their status.
Generally, a facility manager faces several common issues to maintain all the equipment. Some of the most common are:
- Lack of technicians, structure, schedule, or materials.
- Not knowing the current health of each piece of equipment.
- No plan to detect performance degradations, which can lead to high consequences failures.
- Similar assets are reviewed with different strategies.
- Adopt a reactive maintenance routine only
- Choose the old “What we’ve always done” strategy instead of learning how to deal with new technologies and processes
- Don’t pay attention to newer equipment because you think it should operate normally for a long time.
Adopting Asset Performance Management is the best way to keep track of all necessary facilities management services. This way, your team will be able to react more quickly to inconvenient events like equipment downtime.
The Benefits of APM
While an experienced facility manager can do the bare minimum with paper spreadsheets and reports, an asset management plan will only be effective with the adoption of APM software. This system allows you to keep the entire team on the same page regarding asset monitoring and preventive maintenance management. Digitizing asset performance management operations brings many benefits.
Some benefits include:
Keep Track of All Assets
APM software provides a unified view of asset performance, allowing you to monitor assets in real-time through data analytics and prevent serious failures before they happen.
Allows Evaluate Maintenance Strategies
The system will provide all the data you and your team need to monitor assets more personalized. With this data, you will create an efficient preventive maintenance program and later assess its impact on each item.
A Faster Emergency Response
Monitoring the health of the assets allows you to maintain their satisfactory performance for longer. The software offers a history of each piece of equipment, so you can track everything that happened regarding maintenance, replacement of parts, and especially how much time and money was invested in each asset.
The Cost of Maintaining Equipment Goes Down
Simply put, it saves money by allowing you to prevent severe damage to assets and promote a safer working environment for all. Remember that an emergency repair is much more expensive than minor, periodic maintenance that can precisely prevent further damage in the future. The business gets more value out of the equipment long-term.
Increase Operation Reliability
The two main reasons that lead facility managers to invest in asset performance management software are getting the most out of existing assets and facilitating the adoption of preventive maintenance programs instead of the usual reactive maintenance routines.
But you can include an even more important third reason: investing in APM helps make your operations safer and more reliable. By allowing you and your team to monitor assets’ integrity, lifespan, and need for preventive maintenance, APM software helps maintain the overall integrity of buildings, equipment, and machinery. This will generate more efficiency and safety, allowing you to reduce costs and especially risks caused by serious failures—even workplace accidents.
