Facility Management Best Practices to Improve Efficiency

As your facility grows, the marketplace changes, or regulations and standards evolve, gaps in efficiency become more apparent. However, by following facility management best practices, you improve your facility’s efficiency, strengthen its operational processes, and prepare for scale. 

Today, we’re going to look at a few essential facility management best practices—and the tools and processes needed to support them.

We will cover:

1. Implementing an automated maintenance work order management system.
2. Creating a customized preventative maintenance schedule.
3. Improving communication with policies and procedures.
4. Establishing the right metrics and benchmarks.

ore robust your maintenance work management system, the better you’ll be able to predict your maintenance tasks, schedule your facility maintenance techs, and order repair parts as needed. LLumin’s CMMS+ lets you automate these tasks with rule-based, condition and sensor-based data.

Then we will discuss how LLumin’s Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS+) can help your facility reach peak efficiency.

1. Automate Operations With a Maintenance Work Management System

A work order management system lets you track and manage all maintenance and repair requests in a consolidated facility management system. Use LLumin’s CMMS+ to generate maintenance alerts, track requests, and improve your mean time to repair. Use automated reminders for upcoming maintenance tasks, and stay on top of your proactive maintenance initiatives with artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

“AI tools can gather, store, and analyze large data sets in seconds, enabling facility managers to be more proactive in asset performance management and send an automatic update in case of issues. Key players are focusing on offering AI-based integrated facilities management solutions to strengthen their market position.”

– Integrated Facility Management Global Market Report 2022

Work order and asset management systems increase visibility into your operations. Your technicians can see what’s assigned to them and what is most important—and management can see what’s upcoming and what resources may be needed. The more robust your maintenance work management system, the better you’ll be able to predict your maintenance tasks, schedule your facility maintenance techs, and order repair parts as needed. LLumin’s CMMS+ lets you automate these tasks with rule-based, condition and sensor-based data.

A work order management system increases efficiency by:

• Ensuring that your staff is always on the same page.
• Tracking issues so they can be correctly prioritized and never missed.
• Improving scheduling to reduce the potential for overbooking and overtime.

Best practices for improving your work order management system include:

• Automate your work orders – A flag should automatically be set when machines need maintenance.
• Consolidate everything – Your technicians should never have to check multiple platforms for their next maintenance task or service ticket.
• Achieve accountability – Each maintenance request, work order, or asset management ticket should be tracked, including all follow-up actions.

2. Implement Customized Proactive Maintenance Schedules

Preventive maintenance refers to regularly inspecting, cleaning, and servicing your facility’s systems and equipment. By keeping on top of your preventive maintenance, you can avoid many common issues that lead to disruptions in service. But you don’t just want preventative maintenance—you want proactive and predictive maintenance.

LLumin’s CMMS+ helps you establish proactive maintenance schedules by identifying when assets will need maintenance using machine learning, sensor-based data, and historical information. But LLumin’s CMMS+ goes a step further by providing predictive maintenance—telling you when machines are likely to go down.

Rules-based proactive maintenance schedules increase efficiency by:

• Improving the overall health of physical assets.
• Scheduling maintenance when it is most convenient for the organization.
• Establishing controls needed for predictive maintenance.

Best practices for optimizing proactive maintenance schedules include:

• Get to know your technology – Leverage control systems, reliability programs, and machine-level sensors to collect data and monitor health.
• Track your metrics – Know exactly when your systems will fail by tracking historical failure rates.
• Invest in predictive maintenance – Predictive maintenance rules will alert and can suggest remediation on critical machines before a down event or fault.

3. Improve Communication Through Employee Policies and Procedures

Whether it’s a new safety procedure or a change in how work is performed, you need to be able to communicate these changes to your employees—and ensure that the new processes are followed. Similarly, while your employees need the right technology, they also need to use it effectively, which requires training and support.

When properly managed, maintenance technicians won’t just use facility management technology—it will become a significant driver of satisfaction and retention.

“Organizations need to not only embrace digital transformation in the first place but also leverage it as a key driver in employee recruitment and retention,” 

– Jan Hart, Technical Lead, NFPA

At LLumin, we don’t just help you build predictive maintenance systems—we help you achieve success in your employee training and technology adoption efforts. We provide best-in-class support for our CMMS—and work to integrate it into your business and each of your team’s daily work routines.

Improved policies and procedures increase efficiency by:

• Creating a more resilient and reliable process.
• Leveraging technology, tools, and processes more effectively.
• Reducing employee resistance to adoption.

Best practices for operations policies and procedures include:

• Proactively train employees – Communicate, train, communicate, train, and then follow up.
• Focus on safety first – Predictive maintenance improves safety by alerting maintenance technicians when action is needed, why, where, and what level of severity.
• Get employee buy-in – Explain to maintenance techs and facility managers how the technology will increase successful outcomes.

4. Establish Metrics, Such as MTTR, to Track Progress and Performance

How do you know if your facility management best practices are working? By tracking the right performance indicators. Mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) is a key performance indicator for tracking the efficiency of your facility and systems. Other critical indicators include work order backlogs, first-time fix rates, and schedule compliance.

Benchmarks do two things. 

• They tell you how you’re performing now. 
• They give you new goals to shoot for. 

If you aren’t moving toward your goals, something has gone wrong. Likewise, if your new tools and technology have allowed you to achieve your goals, you know the implementation went smoothly.

LLumin’s CMMS+ helps to improve core metrics like MTTR, MTBF, and OEE, first by tracking them. Within LLumin’s CMMS+, you can track all your repairs, asset maintenance schedules, and work orders—automatically.  And data is then reported, consolidated, or analyzed. The CMMS+ will give you tools that vastly improve your performance efficiency by giving you the data you need to complete repairs before they cause system-wide disruption.

Establishing benchmarks increases efficiency by:

• Giving your facility goals to shoot for.
• Showing you your facility’s current efficiency ratings.
• Prioritizing the benchmarks that you need to focus on.

Best practices for establishing important benchmarks include:

• Keep it simple – Don’t go overboard with your metrics. A simpler metric is often the most impactful.
• Focus on the metrics that matter – MTTR is a good one.  Look for other metrics that also impact efficiency and downtime.
• Track metrics reliably – If you aren’t tracking your metrics in a system like LLumin’s CMMS+, they won’t be accurate, and your insights won’t be helpful.

Implementing These Facility Best Practices Strategies With LLumin

LLumin’s CMMS+ is your one-stop answer to better efficiency. Within LLumin’s complete CMMS+ system, you will gain access to:

• Consolidated work order and asset management systems, accessible from anywhere via any device.
• AI-driven insights to help improve your preventative, proactive, and predictive maintenance schedules.
• Training and support to enforce new tools, technology, and processes—making your people and your technology a well-oiled machine.
• Benchmark tracking and optimization, driven by work order tracking, historical information, and real-time sensor-driven data.

Are you ready to implement these facility management best practices? From healthcare and medical facilities to utilities and treatment plants, LLumin’s CMMS+ can help.