How to Improve Your Facility’s Cost-Effectiveness

Any organization that manages even one facility has to deal with a certain amount of overhead. However, there are ways to improve your facility’s cost-effectiveness by improving your productivity and efficiency. We’ll explore some of those here and see how you can potentially use asset inventory management services to lower your expenses in the long run!

Why Focus On Productivity

A greater focus on improving your productivity and streamlining the various operational processes across your facilities, you’ll definitely reduce costs in the long run. Investing in facility asset management services can help you quite a lot in this regard because these platforms cut facility costs through

• Better space management
• Predictive maintenance
• Task automation
• Better employee experiences

Predictive Maintenance

When you properly manage assets throughout your facilities, you can have substantial savings on your hands. As you probably know, teams that perform maintenance on a reactive basis usually can’t plan their time efficiently; they’re waiting for something to noticeably fail before dealing with the problem.

It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole — and one you can avoid entirely with a predictive maintenance approach. Of course, that approach is only possible if you have a deep understanding and a clear overview of the state of all your assets. With that, you can schedule regular maintenance and always stay on top of problems that potentially require repairs before they become serious, costly, or, usually, both.

Remember, if you wait for parts of your assets to noticeably break down before getting your team on the task, you’re increasing the chances that the component will have to be replaced entirely — which is far more expensive than regular maintenance.

Plus, not all breakdowns are immediately visible — some can drain your resources for a while before anyone notices them, not to mention that asset failures in certain facilities can endanger your staff’s safety and your company’s regulatory compliance.

HVAC systems are the best examples of this — unmaintained ones usually malfunction in a couple of years, especially in heavy-duty facilities. In comparison, regularly maintained heating and cooling systems can last long without requiring expensive fixes. Keeping tabs on this alone can help your company reduce expenses related to asset management.

Also, having a central database where you can easily store, track, and find information means you won’t run the risk of unnecessary maintenance, which might be unknowingly repeated by different staff members otherwise.

Better Space Management

Ultimately, the quickest way to save money on operating costs without a large upfront investment is to make better use of the space you currently have. Luckily, asset management software can make your space management far more efficient.

Without modern software solutions, chances are that a hefty chunk of your space is only costing you money. And these expenses might not be readily apparent from your balance sheets — but if you let them slip through the cracks, they can add up to a hefty cost over time.

Implementing a data-driven, software-based space management strategy is the best way to avoid that. You can use asset management software to allocate your available space more efficiently across all your facilities and make the most of it across all your properties.

This will ensure you don’t waste money on vacant or ineffective locations while also helping your staff become more efficient in their daily tasks — ultimately resulting in a more cost-effective and pleasant workplace for everyone involved.

Task Automation

Managing any facility takes a lot of work. And unfortunately, a lot of it is menial work that takes up a lot of your employees’ time. In most cases, this is time they could better spend contributing to your organization in other ways.

Restocking and checking inventories all the time, updating asset data in unmanageable spreadsheets, dealing with sales invoices — all of this is mundane, inefficient work without the right asset management software.

On the other hand, the proper software solution can help you and your staff automate many of these tasks — not only freeing up everyone’s time and helping you get more done in fewer man-hours but also eliminating the possibility of human error in many cases.

Many asset management solutions help you automate:

• Asset classification
• Purchase orders
• Sales invoicing
• Stock management

In short, this type of software helps your facility management team collect data and react to it quicker — giving them ample time to contribute to the organization in other, more productive ways than data entry.

Better Employee Experiences

Ultimately, asset management software that makes your employees’ work easier also makes them more inclined to stay with your company longer. This reduces staff turnover and lowers hiring costs in the long run. Don’t underestimate the passive employee incentive in the form of a well-managed, efficient workplace — it can be just as effective as a salary raise. At the end of the day, people stick with companies that are easy to work for and provide a stress-free environment.