Who Needs What: Engaging Occupants, Tenants, Vendors, and Execs in a Single, Connected CMMS

Property operations and maintenance (O&M) is not a one-person gig, then why do traditional CMMS treat it that way?

While the technician is typically the one performing the maintenance, they are hardly the only stakeholder.

Every property has occupants/employees, tenants/clients, vendors, technicians/field teams, managers, and executives. Each of them is invested in the operations of the building but sorely left out of the maintenance management process by existing CMMS platforms.

Let’s look at the state of affairs with a typical CMMS designed for just one stakeholder: the field technician.

On a typical day, the field teams perform maintenance and update the CMMS. This information is also shared via email, WhatsApp, and other communication tools.

In one of our webinars, 47% of the audience said that their teams spend more than 4 hours a week on tools outside their CMMS for collaboration/stakeholder engagement.

The problems don’t end there.

Operations teams manually collect updates from these disparate systems to notify tenants. They gather data and make reports manually.

Managers and executives wait anywhere between a week to a quarter to see portfolio-level reports.

This results in the following:

• Occupants/customers are dissatisfied because raising service requests is tedious, and updates are sparse
• Tenants losing trust in the property management teams due to poor service experience
• Vendors lose time and efficiency merely communicating updates
• Executives are blindsided without the insights needed to make business decisions

An excellent connected CMMS should give all stakeholders what they need and want — at the click of a button. It should go beyond maintenance to bring together people, processes, and systems. It should meet every ops stakeholder—from vendors to tenants to clients and executives— right where they are.

#1 Occupant experience: Improved comfort and satisfaction

Occupants are the ones who interact with the property, and they are the end consumers. Yet, existing CMMS tools don’t prioritize them. Moreover, they don’t offer ways to manage the occupant experience.

So, there is no easy way for occupants to raise service requests, track issue status, and interact with stakeholders in real-time. This happens outside the CMMS, mired by manual follow-ups over emails and phone calls. In addition, current CMMS tools don’t offer automated ways to send these updates, even for the ops teams, creating an overall sub-standard experience.

A good CMMS should eliminate these challenges. The occupant/employee portal should empower them to help themselves in the following ways:

Book spaces: Reserve conference rooms, parking spaces, or lockers from a mobile application or a kiosk. In the world of hybrid work, this is even more important for managers and executives to forecast occupancy, but we’ll come to that.

Manage visitors: Occupants should be able to invite visitors, approve their entry into the building, and share WiFi passwords frictionlessly. In the post-pandemic world, this should be touchless.

Control comfort requirements: Turning up the heat or dimming the lights should happen right from their seat. More importantly, the CMMS must track their comfort requirements and automate them over time.

Raise service requests: While passing by the conference room and noticing that the projector isn’t working, no occupant should wait to return to their desk and send an email. Instead, they should be able to raise a service request right from their mobile phone as they walk along.

Be updated: For all their requests, they need to get real-time notifications and the ability to give feedback.

A connected CMMS is not just convenient, and it also makes business sense.

Clients have seen a 13% increase in workforce productivity with the connected CMMS platform from Facilio

#2 Tenant experience: Better visibility and service experience

Tenants want to optimize occupant experience to inspire collaboration and innovation in the workplace. Yet, many CMMS platforms lack the features needed to make this happen.

They do not offer a dedicated portal for tenants, push notifications and alerts, or social features like chat and comment that are par for the course in every other digital product we use. An excellent connected CMMS should enable that by filling gaps in visibility, communication, and strategic interventions.

Visibility: The tenant portal must offer complete real-time visibility into occupant experience and compliance posture. It should allow them to raise requests, track status, and monitor package delivery.

Communication: Tenants need on-time notifications about events, security drills, and other announcements. They must also have easy interactions for administrative tasks like giving approvals and responding to queries.

Strategic interventions: Tenants also need a dashboard that gives them a real-time view of occupant experience — pending service requests, the average resolution time, and feedback.

A Facilio client saw an 83% reduction in tenant escalations within months of implementing our connected CMMS.

Beyond that, they also need KPI-driven metrics to make organizational decisions. For instance, occupancy rates can empower them to redesign their space to improve returns; air quality metrics can help improve the health and wellness of their employees.

#3 Contractor experience: Quick TAT and improved SLAs

Vendors and field technicians are evaluated based on how quickly and well they attend to service requests. Unfortunately, some vendors use their mobile apps to do this, leaving ops teams dangling for updates.

Others manage these service requests through emails, WhatsApp messages, and phone calls, forcing ops teams to spend inordinate amounts of time processing paperwork instead of attending to customer needs. A good connected CMMS platform can change this.

Automating basics: Vendor portals must automate critical processes like insurance documentation, permits, contracts, and billing, freeing vendors to handle customer relationships. This would also make it easier for ops teams to manage vendors.

Streamlining workflows: Field teams should be freed from the burden of using multiple tools to complete small tasks. Instead, they need automated work order management, technician assignment, status updates, notifications, and feedback, adding efficiencies at every step.

360-degree visibility: Across technician activity, SLA adherence, service request statuses, and escalations having real-time on-demand visibility is the first step to optimizing turnaround times and minimizing inefficiencies.

A good connected CMMS must allow vendors to do their jobs, eliminating the inefficiencies of updates, communications, and reporting from their desks.

#4 Executive visibility: Real-time KPIs and control at scale

Managers and executives need organizational-level visibility into operations for enterprise-level optimization capabilities. Unfortunately, existing CMMS systems don’t collect enough data or cover every process to enable this.

So, the Tableau or Power BI dashboards that executives get are built using data gathered manually from disparate sources over time. This is often inaccurate and almost always delayed.

On the other hand, a connected CMMS can offer real-time visibility at the portfolio level. This enables leaders to:

• Get on-demand insights on assets, systems, and team performance
• Measure ROI on critical decisions
• Gain integrated view from across ERPs, ESGs, and CMMS software
• Benchmark property performance on custom KPIs
• Increase net asset value (NAV) by improving performance and lifecycle at scale

A connected CMMS can also enable significant cost savings and new revenue streams. For instance, with simple IoT integrations with the connected CMMS, executives can have real-time access to occupancy and visitor movement.

Based on these insights, they can forecast usage and perform demand-based HVAC management. In addition, they can track energy metrics to identify inefficiencies in using their assets and optimize them in real-time.

Today, most existing CMMS is designed for maintenance management — to manage preventive maintenance, work orders, and asset repository.

This is not enough.

To thrive in the highly-competitive post-pandemic business landscape, you need a connected CMMS which adds value to every stakeholder. That’s what we’ve built at Facilio.

This article was originally published in Tomorrow's Facilities Management.