What is Facility Management Software (FMS)?

FMS is short for facility management software and its purpose is to help your business operate more efficiently by organizing, planning, tracking, and simplifying your facilities management and maintenance operations.

Facility managers can use FMS, also known as Computer-Aided Facility Management (CAFM) and Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), to track, plan and manage the operations of their facilities, properties, and their various assets.

These software systems that go by various names allow facility and property managers to be more efficient in carrying out various administrative functions such as ensuring the building is properly inspected, maintained, and repaired. Advanced FMS systems have intuitive user interfaces and are powered by multiple technologies that utilize cloud storage for O&M team access.

Depending on where they are used, facility and property management systems can provide important information about the properties and buildings being managed and just as important, these systems support operational and strategic plant management.

Here are the most common questions asked about FMS software.

What is a FMS used for?

FMS software is extremely versatile and fits the needs of most businesses. It’s primarily used by helping you organize, plan, track, and simplify maintenance operations. Improvements are made by facilitating the tracking of Work Orders, scheduling preventative maintenance, receiving, and handling external work requests, managing assets and part inventories, and generating maintenance reports.

How does a FMS help Work Orders?

Work Order Management is a task that companies often find to be quite troublesome due to how complicated and unorganized it can be. A proper FMS helps you organize and track your work orders with ease. A FMS allows you to see the work that needs to be done, who is assigned to do it, how much time was spent on it, how many resources were used, which invoices are related to the work, and much more. Also, Work Orders can be tied to specific assets, giving you valuable data that allows you to make critical, money-saving business decisions, such as if an asset will need to be replaced immediately or if it has more life to it.

How does a FMS help Preventative Maintenance?

The numerous benefits of Preventative Maintenance are very well-known: equipment lasts longer, less energy consumed, fewer production delays, and more. FMS maintenance software creates an easy-to-use platform that enables you to automatically schedule work weeks, months, even years into the future. The work is assigned to the correct person for the job. They’re automatically reminded about the upcoming work. You’ll be able to track all of the PM in your FMS dashboard, where you’ll be able to see how long a job took and see if they’re being done on time.

How does the best FMS help Work Requests?

Manually handling Work Request is an incredibly daunting and cumbersome task. A proper FMS software system allows anyone in your organization to submit a work request. The work request is then automatically delivered to the right maintenance worker for the job. Upon completion of the work, the requestor is then automatically notified.

How does a FMS help track Asset History?

A FMS system allows you to easily track anything you consider valuable to asset in your organization, including, but not limited to Work Orders, Predictive Maintenance, Preventative Maintenance, labor, and parts cost, and much more. You’ll be able to attach important information to each asset, such as manuals, PDFs, serial numbers, and more. Each asset can have its own repository of important information.

How does a FMS help manage Spare Part inventories?

In addition to tracking larger things like Work Orders and Preventative Maintenance, a FMS system helps you keep a running inventory or critical tools and parts for your maintenance operations. These important parts are automatically integrated with Work Orders and Preventative Maintenance. Your technicians will be able to ensure they have the correct parts on hand before performing the work. You’ll also have access to detailed reporting that shows how many parts have been used within a period of time, how many you’ll need in the upcoming future, and more.

How does the best FMS help with reporting?

The beauty of a FMS is it puts your valuable data to work for you. You’ll have access to reporting that you had previously only dreamed about, and some that you didn’t even know existed! You’ll be able to easily answer questions such as ‘is the correct maintenance work being done?,’ ‘which equipment is costing us the most?,’ ‘where is our maintenance team spending the majority of their time?,’ ‘which asset is breaking down the most?,’ ‘who is our best performing maintenance team member?,’ and more! Axxerion FMS reporting empowers you with answers to your questions.

How can a FMS be installed?

There are two ways to install a FMS: either as an on-premise solution or as a cloud-based SaaS solution. On-premise solutions are installed on your office’s existing servers, maintained by your IT staff, and often incur large setup and ongoing costs. Cloud-based FMS solutions are more popular because they are setup on Axxerion’s server systems. You won’t have to worry about configuring servers or dealing with performing server maintenance. Axxerion offer advanced storage and security features, including frequent data backups so you’ll never lose your valuable data.

How long does a FMS implementation take?

There are many factors to consider when putting a timetable on a FMS implementation. Some things to consider are how large your business is, how many features and modules are you looking to implement, how is your maintenance and management team going to buy-in to using a new software system and which FMS installation are you going with. At Axxerion, our average customer is setup within minutes, with a full successful implementation taking only a few weeks.

How often is FMS software updated?

The frequency of FMS software updates is dependent on the type of installation that you choose. Cloud-based FMS software is updated quite frequently, often daily. On-premise FMS installations is typically updated by your IT team between once a quarter to once per year.

Where is the FMS data stored?

FMS data storage is dependent on the type of installation that you choose. If you go with the cloud-based FMS option, then your data is stored securely on Axxerion’s servers. Your data is backed up frequently so you can rest assured that it will never be lost. If you go with an on-premise FMS installation, then your data is stored on the server at your location.

What Industries Benefit from a FMS system?

Nearly every industry can benefit from a FMS system, including Maintenance, Corporations, Small and Medium Business, Oil and Gas, Schools, Churches, Utilities, Hospitals, Construction, Hospitality, Data Centers, Retail, Self-Storage and more.

Does FMS software work for small businesses as well as large corporations?

Yes, FMS software is designed to work well with businesses of all sizes.

Need help in selecting and making the most of a FMS for your operations and facilities? If the answer is yes, please contact Corey Lee Wilson at clwenterprises@att.net or call (951) 415-3002 for more information for getting the most out of a facility management software (FMS) system.

Image courtesy of SCLogic and article content courtesy of Axxerion and Capterra.