CMMS today is not built with executive decision-making in mind, leading to continued frustration that investments for actionable data vanish into thin air.

Take the scenario where you must make an asset repair or replacement decision around frequently underperforming equipment.

You need information about the build of the equipment along with information on when it was last serviced and the history of incidents. You would also want to look into the vendors who service it.

Typically, there are three problems that you would face here. One, you discover that your data is scattered across siloed tools and applications, making it hard for you to view them together.

Secondly, your CMMS either does not allow you to bring all this data into a coherent report, or it is too complex to generate a report of this sort.

Someone from your team will have to find these disparate data points manually, collate them on a spreadsheet, and visualize them using Excel or other business intelligence tools, costing you time.

Thirdly, you see that the data your CMMS collects or presents is not very helpful for you as an operations leader because the tool you have is built for technicians.

Flipping operational visibility with a connected CMMS

This is where a connected CMMS flips the narrative. It consolidates data for decision-making by bringing together disparate systems that generate data around an asset and related processes.

This includes roping in your ERP system, performance data from the BMS, purchase order information from financial applications, and so on.

Along with integrating these systems into the connected CMMS, all manual processes are digitized and automated to tie in other scattered data points. This improves interoperability, making the correct data set for each stakeholder, including executives, promptly available.

In this manner, the connected CMMS paradigm brings together people, processes, and systems to analyze CapEx and OpEx involved for similar assets and activities across the portfolio, allowing greater executive visibility.

But how do you know that the data you get is the data you need?

Although the relevance of data for an organization is subject to several factors, there is a rule of thumb to identify this. The first key is identifying the challenge you are trying to address with the data.

Returning to the earlier instance, you realize that the particular site has more frequently underperforming assets. Therefore, you want to identify the reason behind this trend so that you can address it.

You know your objective will be met when you successfully reduce downtime by a certain margin. Once you have tied your objective to a definitive metric, you can uncover the data points that correlate to it.

Therefore, to reduce asset downtime, you need to look into asset health for the underperforming asset and the vendors attending it.

The streamlined clarity that the metric provides opens up a low-barrier entry to test new initiatives, make better decisions, and incrementally improve the KPIs of O&M teams.

Once you set these standards for your data, your connected CMMS can create automated reports you can use to address your O&M concerns proactively.

First, let us look at the four most commonly sought objectives and the combinations of data within the connected CMMS that you can leverage to avoid getting caught in decision paralysis.

Improving tenant experience

Tenant and occupant experience is a high-priority objective for any good O&M team since it plays a critical role in avoiding churn.

Most tools for operations, including traditional CMMS applications, treat it like an afterthought.

However, for facility managers and vendors, strategic metrics around this area could include improving comfort scores, optimizing SLA adherence by properties for tenant requests, and bettering tenant request resolution across the portfolio.

Visibility into equipment efficiency

Unexpected asset failures within sites involve substantial capital investments that can throw your budgeting out of the window.

Staying clear of this is critical to ensuring smooth operations. Tracking audit logs, mean time between failure (MTBF) by properties, average and total downtime duration, and opex due to asset downtime are areas that make good strategic metrics in this case.

Improved staff productivity

Visibility into maintenance workflows opens up transparency in vendor management, directing operational expenditure on the right track. Monitoring metrics like vendor performance ratings, work order compliance, and SLA adherence can dial up productivity.

Visibility into vendor compliance and SLA adherence

Automated workflows and vendor management will generate reports on SLA compliance and actively use them to update the list of eligible vendors.

With this objective, facility managers can delve into the nature of non-compliance, if any, and the like to ensure standardization while also looking at overall compliance across sites and vendors.

Data-informed helps validate intuitions and experiential knowledge, building a guardrail to see how close you are to your O&M objectives.

With related CMMS reports that are consciously built to help you leverage the executive visibility you need to take proactive measures, your decision-making process is less complicated and more insight-driven - delivering on the specific promise that led you to trust tech for your data decisions in the first place.

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