How Do Different Industries Benefit From Facility Management?
Facility management is a fairly multi-dimensional domain and comes with its fair share of barriers. The biggest obstacles faced by industries across different domains are often breakages, stoppages, and other unexpected problems with equipment or infrastructure. This category of issues tends to be distracting and urgent, and many of them can simply be prevented with proactive maintenance.
Good facility management doesn’t solely play a vital role in increasing the overall productivity of an organization, but also contributes to the assessment of the organization’s physical environment and its potential to develop further.
The best facility management tries to capture and understand how to manage the diverse needs of these industries in a way that will help them stay ahead of maintenance on each of their buildings’ equipment and systems. Here’s a glimpse of how different industries can use integrated facility management services and benefit their operations -
1. Retail Sector
One of the major responsibilities of facility management companies in the retail industry involves keeping the customer-facing areas up to par- i.e., clean, safe and attractive. These tasks can specifically include cleaning floors, restrooms, windows, and also assembling, stocking and maintaining product displays. Ultimately, it is to help the retail establishment enhance its overall brand image in the face of its customers, increase the efficiency of the store manager and other retail staff at the backend, reduce operational costs and risks, and deliver a satisfactory customer experience.
Also, managing big commercial spaces lies in the purview of facility management. To effectively manage the parking space and also look into the security of the commercial space is a part of integrated facilities management services.
2. IT and Telecom
Another industry which is interestingly taking a lead in adopting integrated facility management companies to smoothen their operations is the IT and Telecom industry. As a domain, IT and Telecom facilities are crucial to almost every type of business and consumer, and is also constantly expanding.
This industry makes regular use of assets like broadcasting stations, communication towers and data centers. Any malfunction could lead to the loss of Internet access, and phone connections, causing massive disruptions for customers across the board. Therefore, in order to minimize such disruptions, facility management comes in to smoothen out operations for tasks like site management, upgrading networks, planned preventive maintenance of assets and completing crucial projects.
3. Education Sector
Schools or any other professional campuses play a weighty role in nurturing young minds with the best experience and knowledge, and leveling the playing field for the future. Hence, when it comes to the education sector, the role of facility management is to maintain the institute’s building and resources as best as possible and meet the needs of those who use these services. Effective facility management can highly elevate and enhance the teaching and learning environment, improve the culture of the educational institutes and support each student’s academic outcomes.
Facility management also includes the regular training of staff and other stakeholders providing them with the knowledge on the most effective practices and to ensure that they are motivated to deliver their best.
4. Banking and Financial Services
It is convenient to assume that banking is a fairly self-supporting industry, in the sense that it carries out most transactional activities and customer interactions within its own branches. However, one must remember that banks have several offices spread across a multitude of locations, infact, creating a setup which is challenging to manage, if not supported with the right facility management resources.
In order to meet the maintenance demands of banking facilities, specialized tools such as IWMS (integrated workplace management system) and CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) are used for support. Infact, these solutions help facility management teams enrich their own processes, such as space management, maintenance, job order tracking and asset management.
These solutions provide facility management teams with a distinctive edge in managing different operations and business processes, including maintenance management, job order tracking, space management, and asset management.
The efficient application of facility management is massively contributing and bringing a positive impact to these industries. Considering the advantages that facility management systems bring to the different verticals mentioned above, more and more industries are likely to join the fold.