Transforming Facilities Management with Wireless Sensors and Digital Checklists

One of the most important aspects of facilities management is to optimize the efficient use of assets, whether it be a process or a physical piece of equipment. Ensuring optimal use of these assets is near impossible without visibility into equipment performance and a task management system to improve productivity.

Over 70% of facility executives identified the need of facilities management applications and tools to help with communication, coordination, and scheduling as the highest opportunity for impact on improving facilities support. With new facilities management technology being introduced regularly, it’s becoming more and more challenging to understand which solution will provide the most ROI (yet another important aspect for successful facilities management).

In this post, we will discuss the significance of implementing wireless sensors andhttps://info.smartsense.co/ultimate-guide-to-digital-checklists https://info.smartsense.co/ultimate-guide-to-digital-checklists to ease the burden of facilities management. From ensuring equipment uptime to efficient task management, implementing tools that increase visibility improves operational performance across the board.

Wireless Sensors for Proactive Visibility 

The importance of data-driven insight cannot be overstated. Making decisions based on emotion or feeling should be left to businesses who do not want a competitive advantage, those who are unwilling to adapt to the changing landscape of data utilization. Collecting data is simply not enough. Businesses who have a wealth of data or data collection opportunity needs to leverage that data in a productive way. To realize the benefits of data, organizations need to effectively interpret that data into meaningful intelligence.

“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.”

Fiorina, Carly. "Information: the currency of the digital age." Oracle OpenWorld. December 2004. Lecture.

The Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) movement is providing more opportunity for equipment analysis than was previously available. With wirefree sensors designed to automate equipment monitoring, proactive management becomes a reality. Previously hidden trends and insights come to the forefront, giving enhanced visibility into equipment performance. Long gone are the days of reactive equipment maintenance, which can lead to additional downtime and wasted resources. Manual processes take time and are prone to error, while an automated monitoring solution reduces the time it takes to monitor these assets, in addition to providing peace of mind that the recorded data is reliable.

Digital Checklists to Improve Productivity

Tools to communicate, coordinate, and schedule daily tasks were ranked as the second highest method to improving facilities support among executives responsible for facilities management. Efficient management of routine tasks can improve employee productivity substantially. Agile systems that allow for customizable checklists provide the foundation for effective integration of people and systems.

Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, explains the importance of checklists in medical procedures, taking advantage of how ‘pit crews’ operate within a tightly controlled set of actions.

“They have checklists. I did not expect to be spending a significant part of my time as a Harvard surgeon worrying about checklists. And yet, what we found were that these were tools to help make experts better.”

Gawande, Atul. “How do we heal medicine?” TED. March 2012. Lecture.

This idea can be prescribed to facilities management, taking into account the complexity of systems and processes that facilities managers are responsible for. While simple in nature, checklists can help to identify points of failure, and prevent problems before they occur. They provide reminders for key tasks that can be easily forgotten, providing more effective preventative maintenance. Missing important steps can have a cascading effect, leading to unnecessary downtime of equipment or additional steps to remedy the lapse in task completion.

Facilities managers have numerous and diverse responsibilities, from the integration of people and processes to ensuring equipment uptime. These assignments can be simplified through the implementation of sensors that monitor equipment performance, as well as checklists to help with task management. A robust facility monitoring solution provides insight into an otherwise invisible world: the intersection between people and equipment.

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