Transformed organizations truly value data in decision-making. However, executives still rely on their experience and gut feeling for critical decisions. This approach does not help – because there are undeniable benefits to use data analysis into daily operations.
Within facility management, it can help facility managers identify areas, where the money is being wasted or space, is underutilized. For companies yet to adopt data-driven decision-making, the transition may seem daunting.
How do you collect and collate data to turn this into actionable information? All it requires is a mindset and appropriate data management and a clear understanding of qualifying data. Intuition and estimations have no place in the world of data-driven decision making.
Strategic boost
Data must not only be used to facilitate transactions but also be harnessed to energize business. The FM industry stands to reap many benefits from a data-driven approach. For instance, if asset information and the data therein are adequately provided, then any automated facilities management system can optimize resource planning to improve the availability, reliability, and performance of any facility.
The ability to collect and analyze current and historical data on asset operations enables a shift from reactive to preventive. Finally, it also helps to move to predictive maintenance. It is a fact that a comprehensive PPM (Planned Preventive Maintenance) data does help in forecasting future emergencies.
Maintenance teams can readily analyze historical data to calibrate future PPM strategy, breakdown analysis, and to work on future life cycle maintenance. Ultimately, proper data management supported by automated analysis & visualization can predict and help in more effective analysis of asset life cycle planning.
Until recently, most domain experts in the FM industry had typically been dealing with first principles and physics-based analytics – this was good enough with relatively small amounts of data manageable by humans.
As the volume of data grows, leveraging on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) will play key roles in overcoming the limitations of calculations that can be performed by humans to achieve “predictive analysis”.
This needs to be supported with scalable database definitions that allow for data mining along with the flexibility to adopt to data capturing – across the fragmented FM market.
Better grip on costs
Reporting and analytics can provide FMs with several benefits, including a better understanding of the way their facility is operating and most importantly, the utilization of resources at hand. Given that resources form 80 percent of facility management cost, the visibility on their utilization gives a window to optimization that leads to the cost efficiency of the highest level.
By generating useful reports, FMs can keep track of company-wide assets and inventory, which will assist in informing how you allocate assets while simultaneously lower company expenditure.
Based on relevant and critical data collection and integration, most MIS can be provided through data visualization, dashboards and live reporting, wherein effective data analytics can be obtained for the use of stakeholders. Live dashboards help to monitor activities and facilitate decision making that is critical to run facilities.
The analytics was also given to help review the history for diagnostic purposes to prepare necessary correction and improvement plans. Useful data analytics provides invaluable, evidence-based insights on how to optimize the function of an office.
FM has evolved to extend its footprint and encompassing more services with the expansion of its IFM (Integrated Financial Management) model. Transactional data be analyzed to review trends as well as help to monitor.
It is essential that relevant and key data critically needed for the assets and services against each SLA (Service Level Agreement) be stored. Workforce productivity and deployment are other aspects that can significantly benefit from data analysis, if provided in an appropriate format containing crucial information.
Who wins in the process? Winners will not just be facilities management providers. They will also be asset owners, manufacturers, assurance providers, other data providers, regulators, insurers, and other industry stakeholders.
Above all, what a data-based approach to facilities management allows is for an organization to effectively forecast its company’s future. By understanding what kind of impact your decisions have had in the past, you’ll be able to refine your strategy for the future.
With the help of this data, facility managers can have a firm grip with regards to their actions and their results. There is no doubt that a practical data-driven approach helps in changing behaviours to positively affect operations and, most importantly, the bottom line.
Source: Gulf News