Facilities management software is one of the most exciting business software advancements in the last ten years. Computer-Aided Facility Management (CAFM) software (also known as Facilities Management or FM software) aids companies in keeping track of assets, maintaining facility operations, and achieving best practices in planning by providing a variety of features and functionality.

Here are some of the reasons why facility managers benefit from FM software:

Maintenance

A full set of maintenance features, which help schedule and complete maintenance tasks for assets within the building, is one of the most popular and common features in FM software. In fact, equipment and system maintenance is the focus of a separate class of computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software.

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Some people mix up CMMS and FM software, but Facilities Management software considers maintenance and goes even further to provide comprehensive facilities management support.

Property Management

Facilities management software can also assist with various aspects of facility management for a facility. On a daily basis, Facilities Management software can aid in the tracking of assets and equipment, as well as the use of their location information in situations where companies must plan for their use over a specific time period.

In the long run, this data can aid in the management and planning of rentals, allowing businesses to stay on top of their contractual property management responsibilities.

Fleet Management and Visitor Handling

Many Facilities Management systems also assist companies in keeping track of corporate fleets as well as individual trucks or other vehicles that enter and exit the facility. To that end, some Facilities Management systems include features that assist in the planning of visitor flows. Some tools, for example, could be used to designate areas of a property or specific bays within a facility for visitors or vehicles with restricted or special access.

Order Management and Materials Transport

Facilities Management software can also be used to track packages or materials entering or leaving a building in a variety of ways.

This could entail keeping track of the company’s internal purchases or shipments or deliveries leaving the facility. In either case, having this kind of quantifiable resource can give companies an advantage in their day-to-day operations.

Managing Services and Contractors

Facilities Management resources can also assist in tracking various types of authorized traffic within a facility. This could entail overseeing and scheduling contracting tasks related to building maintenance, or it could entail overseeing a large number of contractors working in the company’s core operations, such as a call center, a manufacturing floor, or other types of business activities.

Managing services and contractors improves the facility’s security as well as the sensitive company data stored on machines inside the facility.

Health and Safety

FM software is specifically designed to aid in the transparency of health and safety benchmarks and outcomes. It could greatly aid compliance with various industry standards, such as OSHA in all types of workplaces, HIPAA in the healthcare industry, and Sarbanes-Oxley in the financial field.

It can aid in the documentation of best practices for avoiding workplace accidents, or, in the worst-case scenario, the documentation of the facts around a workplace accident. Various kinds of health and safety features can save time and effort for busy management teams while also helping the company gain a better reputation.

Top-Level Decision Support

Although it is very useful for day-to-day operations management, CAFM can also be very useful for big picture changes and decision support for the leadership when it comes to making momentous decisions.

CAFM can help facility managers understand when it’s time to scale back, where to allocate resources, and how to streamline and evolve operations in many areas of the business, from asset management to business footprint management.

CAFM systems are invaluable to modern facility managers because they offer all of these features.