Sponsored by
Assessments are essential to good facilities management and can have far-reaching impacts on the future success or failure of your FM efforts. So why are you still using old-fashioned tools like digital cameras and clipboards to do them? New technology is making it easier and faster to conduct more accurate and meaningful facility assessments.
4 Reasons Why It’s Important To Get Facility Assessments Right
Facility assessments are crucial for making informed decisions about maintenance, repair, and capital improvement strategies.
1. Asset Management
Assessments provide valuable insights into the current condition of your assets. They help you create an inventory of assets and prioritize maintenance and replacement efforts based on their condition. This proactive approach maximizes the lifespan of your assets, optimizes resource allocation, and minimizes unexpected failures.
2. Capital Planning
Assessments help you estimate the short- and long-term costs of maintaining, repairing, and replacing facility components. As a result, you can create more accurate budgets and financial plans to allocate your resources effectively – avoiding unexpected expenses and ensuring money is available for critical repairs or replacements.
Read More: 3 Essential Ingredients To Better Capital Planning
3. Risk Management
Facility assessments identify potential safety hazards and compliance issues. By evaluating your structural elements, electrical systems, fire protection systems, and other critical components, you can mitigate risks, prioritize corrective actions, and ensure a safe working environment for your occupants.
4. Regulatory Compliance
Assessments help ensure your compliance with relevant codes, standards, and regulations. By identifying any deficiencies or non-compliance issues, you can address them promptly and avoid penalties or legal complications. Regular assessments give you the opportunity to implement necessary changes and maintain compliance over time amid evolving regulatory requirements.
Traditional Assessments Are Letting You Down
We’ve come a long way from the days of film cameras and DOS (disk operating system), but facilities assessments continue to be incredibly time consuming, manual, and inefficient. Why? Because the traditional assessment process is disconnected, disorganized, and disparate – and that leads to a load of challenges.
Incomplete And Outdated Information
Traditional assessments typically capture a snapshot of the facility’s condition at a specific point in time. However, we all know that facilities are dynamic and can change rapidly. By relying solely on periodic assessments, you risk missing important updates or new issues that arise between assessments. In addition, you end up starting from square one every time you do a new assessment.
Time Consuming And Costly
Traditional assessments involve manual inspections and data collection, followed by manually transferring the data to different programs to analyze it and put it into a presentable format. This disconnected process is disorganized, labor intensive, and often results in inaccuracies. This process is especially inefficient if you’re a large organization with multiple locations.
Limited Data Analysis
Traditional assessment methods often lack robust data analysis capabilities. If you’re still relying on paper-based or spreadsheet-based systems, it’s tough to analyze and interpret data comprehensively. It restricts your ability to identify patterns, trends, and correlations that can provide valuable insights for making decisions.
Lack Of Integration
Traditional tools and methods often operate in isolation, making it very difficult to link your assessment findings to your asset management, maintenance planning, and budgeting activities. As a result, it’s challenging to develop a holistic and proactive approach to facility management.
Limited Accessibility And Collaboration
Traditional assessment tools and methods don’t make it easy to share, collaborate, and access assessment data among stakeholders. Definitely not a good thing when multiple teams or departments are involved in facility management. Additionally, it’s a pain trying to retrieve historical assessment data or track your facility’s progress over time.
But enough doom and gloom. New technology makes these challenges obsolete. Embracing new, better assessment tools will make your assessments faster, more streamlined, more accurate, and more useful to your everyday decision making.
Better Assessments Begin With A Better Tool: End-To-End Software
End-to-end assessment software does all the steps of an assessment in one tool. AkitaBox is the first example of this type of software on the market. It includes four main components:
Data Collection
Simplify, standardize, and speed up data collection
Gather onsite asset data in seconds with the AkitaBox Capture mobile app. Snap and upload photos, record condition data, and add recommendations right on your tablet – even if you’re offline. You can associate those photos and notes with each asset as you go. Simply create the asset, pin it to the correct location on the digital floor plan, then fill in the corresponding information and attach photos.
Cost Estimation
Input your own or draw from industry-standard cost data
AkitaBox is connected directly to a cost database. Pull up the cost data while still within the platform and associate that cost with an asset. No more looking up costs separately and manually inputting them into your assessment. You can also adjust costs based on your building’s geographic location or its complexities.
Data Analysis
Translate raw data into easy-to-understand, live dashboards
The AkitaBox Insights reporting engine is an integrated BI (business insights) tool. No more manually transferring assessment data between multiple tools to generate results. With just a few clicks, create a variety of reports – from how many assets are past their expected life spans to which equipment will be most expensive to replace. All your reports are displayed in a professional, customizable dashboard.
Report Building
Generate a professional, visually appealing final deliverable in minutes
When you’re ready to present the results to the leadership team, use AkitaBox Report Builder to add notes as well as drag and drop data, graphs, and images to create a professional final report you can export.
In addition to being a complete assessment tool, AkitaBox assessment software is also fully integrated into AkitaBox’s comprehensive FM software platform. So not only can you conduct robust assessments without ever leaving the software, the data you collect is linked into the rest of your FM data (work orders, inspections, preventive maintenance, etc.).
That means you’re always being fed a fresh supply of new data you can use to make smart decisions. In addition, all of your facilities data that lives in AkitaBox is also linked to a powerful capital planning tool, making it easier and faster for you to do capital planning based on up-to-the-minute information.
5 Advantages Of End-To-End Assessment Software
Increased Efficiency
- Save time and labor
- Photos and other data are connected from the start
- Everything stays organized throughout the process and is easy to find
Fewer Errors
- Stay in one system through the entire assessment process
- Prevent inaccuracies that come with manually transferring data between programs
One Tool That Does it All
- Do everything required for an assessment in one place
- Say goodbye to extra interim stages between data collection and report building
- Accomplish more with fewer steps and less manual work
Good For All Sorts Of Assessments
- Facility condition assessments (FCAs)
- Asset inventory or updates
- Energy audits
- Energy, sustainability, governance (ESG)
- Inspections & compliance tracking
- Technology audits
- Capital planning
- Fire-Life-Safety audits
- ADA compliance reporting
- And so much more
Creates Living Facility Condition Assessments
- Connects to the AkitaBox facilities management platform
- Everyday facilities data feeds into the FCA, keeping it alive and current
- No need to start every new FCA from scratch
Read More: Moving From A Cyclical To A Continuous FCA
Don’t You Deserve Better Assessments?
If you’re tired of spending hours or days on conducting assessments only for the results to quickly become obsolete, it’s time to consider an end-to-end assessment tool. Visit the AkitaBox Assessment Resource Center to start learning more.
And if you’d like to see this type of tool in action, hit us up for a customized demo.
