Facilities management software can help local governments solve six big problems.
Local governments offer many important services, such as police, fire, municipal courts, and public works. There would be problems with these services very quickly if there wasn't a reliable facilities team to keep things running smoothly.
Facilities management is a very important part of local government, so there is a lot of pressure on it to do well. But many facilities departments are having trouble because people are leaving, equipment is getting old, and budgets are getting smaller.
Here are six problems that local government facilities staff have to deal with and how complete facilities management software can help.
All of the information about my floor plans and facilities is out of date.
Many local governments are trying to solve 21st-century problems with 20th-century tools and ideas. Do any of these sound familiar?
There are old floor plans on paper, silos of data that are spread out in different places, and no one place where all facility information is kept. Instead, paper documents are put into file folders and binders, and metrics and key performance indicators are tracked using simple Word documents and Excel spreadsheets (KPIs).
With complete, accurate data, it's easier for government buildings to be run in a way that is safe, efficient, and doesn't cost too much.
Solution: Online data archive
Imagine if everyone on your team could go to one place to see all the information about the building. Do you want to know more about warranties for boilers? Done. Do you need to know when the last time was that the water heater was serviced? No issue. Need to let another department see the most up-to-date floor plans? This was written for you.
Isn't it incredible? That's how excellent building management software is. It stores all the information about your building in a digital format that your team can easily access.
One of the best things about FM software is that it has the most up-to-date digital floor plans. Some software partners, like CloudApper, will take your current floor plans, digitize them, and then update them as part of the process of getting FM software. Some software partners will also get all the information about your facilities and put it into the software for you.
I need to know what's inside any of my buildings.
Local governments are in charge of a wide range of things, like courthouses, park shelters, wastewater treatment facilities, and more. Each of these buildings is different and is used for a different thing.
If you only have your memory or old lists, it's hard to keep track of rooms and equipment in a lot of buildings. How can you manage many buildings with millions of square feet if you don't even know what's inside each one?
Putting assets on a map based on where they are
Some FM software lets you connect your digital floor plans to your assets. You can find the location of any property you want, like electrical panels, light fixtures, power generators, water fountains, trash cans, and so on.
Colored pins show where your assets are on your digital floor plan. It's easy to find your assets and know where they are in each place. Now, you can:
Plan good routes for regular maintenance, cleaning, and checks. Show a new team member or someone from outside the team where an asset is.
Use the CloudApper Facilities app to see how it works. (It's important to know that not all FM software can do this, so keep that in mind as you look at your options.)
I'm stuck doing reactive maintenance over and over.
There are a lot of facility managers who know what you're going through. Especially if their buildings were old and they didn't have enough money to keep up with repairs, which were expensive and took a long time.
They want to be more proactive, but they can't because they have to keep track of their asset life cycles, their maintenance histories are wrong, and their work order processes are done on paper.
Demands for reactive maintenance can bury your team under a mountain of expensive and hard to solve problems.
Solution: Better organization of work
It will be hard to start a preventive maintenance (PM) program if you can't keep up with your daily maintenance. FM software gives team members instant access to work orders. This saves paper, improves efficiency, and keeps a record of all tasks that have been done.
With CloudApper Facilities, you can better handle reactive work and have more time and money for preventive maintenance.
The FM software's reporting feature lets you keep track of maintenance work at all of your buildings. Make sure that work orders are being done, and solve any problems before they get out of hand.
Preventive maintenance tasks can be scheduled automatically with FM software. It also gives your professionals access to any asset data and PM methods they might need while they are on the go. Also, FM software makes sure that your employees do all the jobs you give them.
Too much work needs to be done by hand.
The 2022 State of Local Government Survey found that most local governments in the United States lack resources and have to do too much work by hand.
Too little money (44%) and too much manual labor (34%).
Whether it's slow processes that make you go back and forth a lot or old paper-based systems, these problems slow you down and make your work less effective.
By using an FM platform to take care of your buildings, you can reduce waste and use fewer resources overall.
Making things easier to get to and automating them
39% of local governments have made investing in technology their top priority for 2021 so that they can automate routine tasks and processes. FM software does a lot of things like this.
FM software lets your team do more work faster with fewer resources by automating tasks that used to take a lot of time and labor, like organizing work orders, entering asset information, and doing routine inspections.
For instance, FM software has a feature that lets you call for help.
Residents can use the interactive web application to ask for help instead of calling or emailing the maintenance department.
The software automatically tells the tenant how their request is going and gives you a few seconds to look over the work order and set a date for it.
Your maintenance technician is automatically notified when they have a repair order, and they can get to any information they need to do the job.
No one needs to spend the whole day taking care of all the work orders, making sure the technicians finish them, and answering tenants' questions about the status of their requests.
Problem: I'm in trouble if one of my technicians leaves, even for a short time.
According to the 2022 State of Local Government Survey, one of the most important things is to have enough staff.
54% say they need help finding people with the skills they need to fill the positions of those who are leaving.
62% of those who answered said that if they took a two-week vacation, it would be hard for someone else to take care of their responsibilities.
When the person on your facilities team who knows the most about the building goes on vacation, gets a new job, or retires, what happens to the rest of your team? Probably in deep water with no way to get out.
Your technicians with more experience know a lot of useful information that the rest of your team needs to know.
FM software is a place to store all the information about your facility, like how to fix that AC unit that won't work right and where to find that one hard-to-find item. Since everything is digital, everyone on the team can use their phones to get all the information they need.
When someone is out of the office, FM software makes it easy for someone else to take care of unfamiliar facilities or procedures. In fact, they went to the same place less often to check on how things were going. Because the program has all the important information, the team in charge of the building can better guess what they will need before they leave. It is the best way to teach someone something.
Your FM software should have all the information about your facilities so that work can be done even when someone is away. The people who are still on the team can quickly take over the job of someone who is leaving. Also, using technology like FM software makes your maintenance team more appealing to people who might want to join.
My city government wants more people to work together and share information.
More and more people want departments to work better together, according to the State of Local Government Survey for 2022. More than half of the people who answered say that the best way for departments to work together is to use technology that brings together data from different sources.
People also want capital planning to be better and more open. For example, almost 70% of local governments want to make their capital planning more strategic, flexible, or collaborative.
Your building data is the key to better coordination between departments and more openness in capital planning. It could be a powerful tool if you know how to use it well.
Answer: Transparency through information
FM software lets you keep track of, gather, manage, and share accurate, up-to-date information about a facility. It combines a number of data streams to give you a full picture of where you stand in the market (maintenance activities, asset conditions, etc.). Having learned this, you can:
Establish more precise capital budgets (and show the data you used to come up with your budget)
Show the costs and risks of putting off purchases and projects that need money.
Give feedback to other departments that is backed up by data.
Be a good source of information about all facilities.
FM software can help your business work better together and be more open by using data from your facility.
The local government facilities management app in the cloud doesn't work.
CloudApper Facilities is an all-in-one facilities management system for state and local governments that:
Asset management, Maintenance monitoring, Building management Work order management.
Find out how we can help you with some of the toughest FM issues. Ask for a demo right away!