5 Tech Features Facilities Managers Can’t Live Without

How often do you find yourself saying, “I wish there was an easier way to do this”?

Chances are, quite a few facilities managers use that phrase every day. The good news is easier ways do exist to complete nearly every task you face on a daily basis. Implementing these tools and systems will help streamline operations, automate mundane tasks, and give you more time to pay attention to the more pressing problems of your day.

Adaptive Workflow Tracking

The business world is increasingly embracing a larger remote workforce. Offices are used as areas to collaborate, develop, and design new ideas. The day-to-day work can be, and often is, done from home.

That means you’ll need the ability to track workflows and project tasks across a diverse workforce. Emailing details back and forth regarding a project gets hectic, and it’s easy to lose an important piece of a proposal to your inbox.

Again, we’ll turn to automation – adaptive workflow tracking software that shows real-time project progress via a cloud-based platform will be the norm in a few short years. Products such as Trello or Asana are great examples of adaptive workflow tracking integrating with high success into businesses of all sizes.

Building Monitoring

What if you could forecast maintenance issues before they became an issue? Or had the data and integrations to view energy usage of your building and identify ways to save on operating costs?

That’s what building monitoring delivers – unparalleled insight into how your building acts when occupied, empty, or somewhere in between.

All of that data can be overwhelming at first, which is why it’s important to determine what you want to learn from your building monitoring software. Do you need to save money on operating costs? How about managing energy use during times of peak energy demand? Identifying the goals you want to achieve before you start using this type of software will make your use of it that much more effective.

Efficient Work Requests

Let’s go back to meeting rooms for a moment – what’s one thing that can tank a meeting with an important client or prospective high-level employee?

Conference room equipment that just doesn’t work. From projects to bad HDMI connections, the issues you can have are endless, which creates the need for efficient and intuitive work requests all the more important.

The solution for these issues comes, once again, from Teem. They’ve simplified the work request process down to a few simple taps – inside the conference room itself.

For facilities managers, this removes the headache of being the middleman between broken conference room equipment and the IT department. You won’t have to handle any of those requests.

Automated Building Entry

How often do people need to access the office during hours when it’s usually locked up? They’ll ask for special permission to get into the building during off hours, which is more busywork than it is an inconvenience, but removing that aspect of a facilities manager’s job would streamline the entire job, right?

That’s what automated building entry technology can do for you. A feature that’s gaining a lot of ground is using facial recognition technology to let people in and out of the building. It’s more secure than key fobs or cards, and unlike cards and fobs, you can’t forget your face at home. It’s like batting a triple, or killing three birds with one stone. Automated building entry removes the need to grant special access to the building, replace missing key fobs or cards, or issue new ones to new employees.

All-in-One Scheduling Services

Whether you manage a facility for one business or multiple companies, keeping track of meeting schedules is one of the most frustrating issues you face.

That’s where a service like conference room scheduling from Teem can make life easier. All conference room schedules are kept in one app, so employees and schedulers alike can see real-time stats of what rooms are in use, which are free, and which ones are scheduled to be used.

Automation of scheduling allows you as a facilities manager to plug in the information and let it be. You don’t have to worry about double-booked rooms ever again.

Every facilities manager has his or her pet peeve they’d like to see gone. Chances are, tech mentioned in this list can alleviate that pain point and create a streamlined, efficient facility.