The Top 5 Challenges for Facilities Management

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How Intelligent Collaboration Solutions Support Facilities Management

Enterprise facilities managers, property managers, and corporate real estate leaders are tasked with efficiently and effectively overseeing assets, buildings, vendors, and campuses. The most successful facilities management leaders expertly maintain their buildings and physical assets while controlling costs.

In addition to overseeing physical facilities, operations managers direct a network of mobile, on-the-go workers dispersed across their properties. This workforce is made up of operations, janitorial staff, technicians, maintenance, security staff, customer service representatives, and more. Often, facilities teams are a mix of staff and contractors that need to seamlessly communicate and work together.

Corporate janitor cleaning concrete for large office building - Orion Facilities Management

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Managers coordinating and overseeing a dispersed facilities workforce need to be aware of the top trends and latest innovations that improve workforce collaboration. The reality is that most field teams waste time trying to communicate over multiple devices like radios, limited push-to-talk (PTT) apps, mobile phones, and inconvenient desktop computers away from the point of work. Today’s facilities management workforce needs a better alternative.

They need the ability to communicate with a multimodal experience on the go, including voice, text, photo, video, and files. They also need a voice-first, always-on, scalable solution to improve collaboration and employee productivity.

Here are the top 5 challenges Facilities Management can overcome with better collaboration technology:

#1 Operational Oversight

The facilities management workforce operates dispersed across buildings, campuses, and even multiple sites. Managers of dispersed operations need to dispatch teams that efficiently tackle the most business-critical tasks like security concerns, maintenance, or cleaning. They also need to ensure those tasks are completed on time and to the level of the organization’s standards.

Orion’s collaboration technology with dispatch and task management helps managers assign tasks and monitor progress in one view. The web-based Orion Dispatch Console provides operational control, voice dispatch, and location tracking services in any web browser — enabling dispatchers and operations managers to work from any location.

#2 Dynamic and Urgent Situation Management

Dynamic situations like maintenance or cleaning requests and urgent or safety-related incidents can happen at any time. Both evolving and urgent situations require the ability to centralize management, share critical information, and locate relevant personnel quickly.

Managers use Orion’s collaboration solutions to communicate real-time information, view worker locations, and deploy immediate assistance. Operations management and team supervisors can create ad hoc, 1:1, or limited group environments that enable managers to connect directly with relevant workers.

#3 Visibility of Team Members

Advanced location services are table stakes for today’s facilities managers overseeing a dispersed workforce. Supervisors need to immediately know where their team members are in real-time in one view.

Orion’s intelligent collaboration solution delivers real-time location and contextual data for facilities management teams so they always know where their employees are, what they’re doing, and how they’re performing. Detailed location information can track workers indoors, across various floors, and even at subterranean levels. Orion’s heat mapping also tracks employee location history and productivity so managers can measure results and optimize future tasks based on inputs like foot traffic, task completion, and compliance protocols.

Learn more about The Orion Collaboration Platform for Facilities Management

#4 Increased Productivity

Today’s facilities management teams must focus on reducing costs, increasing staff productivity, and improving operational efficiency. Automated processes help optimize operations and reduce costs by promoting protocol compliance, documenting and archiving processes, and automating routine tasks.

Process automation reduces or eliminates time-consuming tasks like manually logging activities. Janitorial staff can use photos to document rooms cleaned. Security staff can use voice-automated checklists to confirm access points are closed and secure at the end of operating hours. And maintenance staff can record property damage with text, photo, or video that records relevant information.

Automating these processes promotes heads-up work and frees personnel to focus on higher-value tasks. Additional workflows like language translation bots also support multilingual teams, ensuring that workers receive commands in their native language.

In each of these examples, the Orion collaboration platform logs and documents the incident or starts an automated workflow and provides workers with their next steps or tasks. Managers are able to analyze employee request patterns and response times to improve productivity and drive insight into future planning.

#5 Safety and Compliance

Safety is key for the distributed facilities management workforce. Collaboration platforms use automation to improve the safety of distributed or lone workers. In the event of an emergency, workers can trigger multi-function workflows like automated safety check-ins, lone-worker protocols, incapacitation monitoring, and location breach alerts. Trigger words like “fire” or “help-help” start workflows that deploy resources or alert managers.

Compliance is also critical for enterprise facilities managers. Operations management needs the ability to review, analyze, and evaluate information to improve safety and prevent future incidents. Orion records, stores, and archives all messages for review, analysis, and future compliance needs.

The Orion Solution

Orion addresses each of the top 5 facilities management challenges with the best collaboration solution for facilities management leaders and their frontline workforce. Facilities management teams that modernize communications with Orion’s intelligent collaboration platform gain the benefits of digital transformation and create more effective, productive, and safer teams.

Ultimately, the Orion Collaboration Platform for Facilities Management creates an operations system of record. Orion records and archives a real-time and complete view of operations so that facilities management leaders can succeed.

Learn about Orion for Facilities Management

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