In an April 5, 2017 blog post — “What Facilities Managers Need to Know: Commanding the Facilities Ship”, David Markowitz, senior director, product marketing for ServiceChannel concludes a series of posts highlighting 13 trends, technologies, and best practices his company identifies as essential for facilities managers in 2020 and beyond. These trends are enumerated in an ebook available from ServiceChannel, What You Need to Know to Succeed in Facilities Management in 2020.
ServiceChannel is a provider of a cloud-based service automation and reporting platform for facility management. Headquartered in New York City, the company works with facility leaders in a variety of industry sectors, providing its platform for those working in retail, restaurant, healthcare, financial, and government.
Commanding The Facilities Ship is Trend #13, about which Markowitz writes…
Whatever your course, one of the overarching themes that will drive facilities management’s evolution is visibility. Knowing what’s going on is a prerequisite to optimizing what you’re doing. Sounds obvious. But true visibility in practice is much harder than it sounds and a never ending endeavor. And if visibility is a challenge now, it’s only going to get more complicated with data-hungry requests and internet-enabled devices.
There’s not a single facilities department that doesn’t need to increase the visibility and transparency into its program, regardless of business model. Whether you’re using an outsourcer, relying on subcontractors or self-performing contractors, doing the work with internal staff or some combination thereof, it’s critical to have the proper vision into the work performed, the health of your facilities and equipment, and however the outside world is or could affect your operations.
The FM leader of tomorrow will need to be like the commander of a modern ship. A comprehensive information-rich command center will be a must. Like on a naval bridge today where there’s a range of electronics to track inbound threats, current ship status, weapon readiness, etc., you’ll need to do the same on your bridge.
You’ll need automated technologies to track the greater universe of contractors, staff, assets, work orders, service requests, locations, environmental conditions, service level requirements and more. This wealth of data simply cannot be monitored with emails, spreadsheets and phone calls. Events are moving too fast and responsibilities are too broad.
To steer your program, your company and career effectively, it’s imperative you have complete transparency and visibility into the full range of operations. Only that way can you ensure you have the proper information to guide you to the right decisions and actions.
To read the rest of the blog and to access the ebook (registration required), visit this link.
