Like you take care of your home, you need to take care of your business too. Facility management software helps you keep operations and processes running smoothly. This article will cover a list of facility management software features you need to consider to make an intelligent buying decision.

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What This Article Covers:

• Key Requirements & Features
  • Maintenance Management
  • Scheduled and Preventive Maintenance Tracking
  • Asset and Equipment Maintenance
  • Facility Inventory Management
  • Work Order Management
  • Space Management
  • Movement Management
  • Lease Administration
  • Vendor Management
  • Reporting
  • Capital Project and Program Management
  • Environmental Sustainability and Energy Performance Analysis
  • Real Estate Portfolio Management
  • Document Administration
  • Visitor Management
  • Transaction Management
  • Incident Management
  • Key and Lock Management
  • Time and Attendance
  • Invoice Management
  • Transportation Management
  • Integration
  • Supporting Features
  • Security
• Next Steps

Facility management software is a subcategory of CMMS (computerized maintenance management systems) that focuses on repairing and maintaining an organization’s facilities rather than its assets. The goal is to help you manage your buildings, spaces and occupants more efficiently.

Key Features & Requirements

Every business is different. Facility management platforms offer you a range of options, including open-source facility management solutions. You won’t need every feature offered, so we’ve compiled a checklist to help you identify your facility management software requirements and get organized in your search for software solutions.

The top facility management software features include:

1. Maintenance Management

Maintenance management is critical to facility management. In fact, it partially determines the long-term success of your company because poorly maintained resources halt operations and cause you to lose money. After all, it’s critical to efficiently maintain company assets to ensure low wastage and smooth production.

There are multiple platforms to help with this process, enabling maintenance managers to control costs, ensure compliance and schedule work. Maintenance management tracks and plans all the maintenance on your assets, from scheduling to work orders. Some maintenance management modules will even offer assistance in ensuring regulatory compliance and calculating costs.

• Maintenance Planning & Scheduling
• Work Order Maintenance Management
• Regulatory Compliance
• Material and Parts Management
• Maintenance Management Cost Calculation

2. Scheduled and Preventive Maintenance Tracking

Regularly performing preventive maintenance on a piece of equipment can decrease the chances of it failing. It involves regular check-ups while the equipment is still working to avoid unexpected breakdowns. Preventive maintenance is more complex to coordinate than run-to-failure maintenance because it involves planning the maintenance schedule.

Preventive maintenance is all well and good, but if you have to track that preventive work manually, it’s not very efficient and takes too much of your valuable time. Scheduled preventive maintenance tracking automates scheduling, email alerts and other tracking features to keep your preventive maintenance on task.

Some solutions have user-friendly interface features like drag-and-drop capabilities or record-keeping features for uploading pictures or file attachments and logging audit trails.

• Automated Preventive Maintenance Tracking & Scheduling
• Drag-and-Drop Interface
• Photo and File Attachment Uploads
• Automatic Email Notifications
• Alerts and Reminders
• Audit Trail

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3. Asset and Equipment Maintenance

Your assets are the lifeblood of your business, so maintaining them is crucial. Asset and equipment management covers all aspects of any type of equipment, including vehicles, mobile devices, software, office assets, service records, maintenance schedules, and equipment non-conformance or faults.

It’s important to be able to track all aspects of equipment maintenance, not just the scheduled tasks but also the unexpected maintenance requirements. You can record and track the progress of service records, maintenance schedules, equipment faults and equipment non-conformance. Calibration scheduling and reporting are also common.

Storing everything relating to a piece of equipment in one module makes it easy to locate. You can raise and track repair orders. You can also track parts inventory and record usage. This feature records any equipment that’s sublet or shifted to another location. Facility management software offers a variety of features to track and manage the maintenance, performance and repair of assets.

Use color-coded maintenance scheduling features in MaxPanda. Source

• Asset and Equipment Tracking
• Asset Performance Management
• Asset Maintenance and Repair
• Asset Hierarchy Management
• Asset TCO
• Asset Configurator
• Reservation Summary

4. Facility Inventory Management

Facility inventory management allows managers to balance projected inventory needs, carrying costs, ordering lead times and space availability. It also helps you decide what items you should keep in the inventory, when you’ll need them and where your employees use them within the facility.

Regardless of what makes up your inventory, you need to keep track of it. Some operations need to track, manage, record and log materials or other inventory. Some need features that can function over multiple locations. Most will probably find automated alerts and audit trail features useful.

Some CMMS systems include enough inventory management software features for your operation, but other users need dedicated software just for their facilities.

• Material Inventory Management and Tracking
• Multi-site Inventory Managemen
• Inventory Recording
• Stockroom Management
• Lot Control and Serialization
• Inventory Logs/Audit Trail
• Automatic Alerts and Notifications

5. Work Order Management

Work orders get things done smoothly and properly. The work order management process begins when the work order is created. You can accomplish this through several channels, such as a mobile device or the system itself. With EAM software, some types of work orders, such as preventative maintenance and fixed tasks, automatically trigger once configured according to their specific parameters.

The order management process is then controlled by the workflow, which is based on the type of work required. For example, by using workflow options, additions such as planning, actions taken and other information populate for later records.

Most facilities management software solutions provide options for creating, evaluating, automating and prioritizing work orders. They come with various dashboards and user portal options to choose from for interacting with your interface.

Use eMaint to create work order requests. Source

• Work Order Creation & Evaluation
• Work Order Tracking
• Work Order Priority
• Work Order Automation
• User Portal
• Automatic Notifications
• Dashboards

6. Space Management

Space management is the supervision and management of any physical space, like single or multiple floors in a building, meeting halls, or storage rooms, occupied or owned by your organization. If your asset is your space, you need ways to manage it efficiently.

Depending on the type of operation you have, your needs for this category will vary greatly. Do you rent out apartments? Space utilization dashboards, availability management and room scheduling software could be for you. Do you have mobile worksites or locations to monitor? You may want to look into a GPS interface. Know your specific needs before you search for any of the features in this category.

• Space Planning
• Room Scheduling
• Facility Scheduling/Availability Management
• Space Utilization Dashboards
• GPS/Google Maps Location Interface
• Interactive Floor Plan
• Site Management
• Automated Meter Reading

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7. Movement Management

Movement management or asset tracking software allows you to track:

• Owned assets
• Asset locations
• Check out and check in details
• Scheduled maintenance information
• Asset cost
• Asset depreciation

If your assets are on the move, your software needs to be able to follow. Users can track and schedule equipment and staff movements and get automated notifications for scheduled movements from a centralized dashboard. Mobile CMMS proves to be a game-changer regarding tracking equipment on the go.

View all asset locations in a side-by-side map and list view or drill down by tags, categories and other filters using itemit. Source

• Movement Tracking & Scheduling
• Automated Email Notifications
• Automated Workflows

8. Lease Administration

Lease administration involves receiving rent from facilities owned and paying rent for facilities leased. If your business leases something, you need to be on top of managing it. Lease tracking and alerts are fairly basic needs, but you can expect plenty of additional features from facilities management software.

Set-it-and-forget-it automated lease payment options are a huge plus for your tenants, and configurable lease management makes fluctuating rental charges easy to handle.

• Lease Tracking
• Automated Lease Payment
• Configurable Lease Management
• Alerts and Notifications

9. Vendor Management

Managing vendors can be a complex process — you have to oversee different contracts and pay rates for vendors depending on the services or goods they provide.

Vendor management features aid activities like searching and sourcing vendors, asking for quotes and pricing, checking vendor capabilities and quality of work, negotiating contracts, assigning jobs, evaluating performance, managing vendor relationships, and ensuring timely payments. This requires you to put in a lot of resources and time.

Users can manage the vendors they source from in the same software that manages the facility itself. From proposal submission and sourcing to tracking your interactions with those vendors, don’t feel like you have to purchase additional software. Or — we shudder at the thought — use pen and paper tracking methods for this functionality.

• Vendor Tracking
• Vendor Sourcing
• RFP Submission

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10. Reporting

BI reporting primarily enables you to receive output or results from a BI solution through integration with your facilities management platform or via BI features natively built in. Based on the parameters set, BI reporting is generally an automated process that captures and reports on analyzed data. These reports can be in the form of statistical data, visual charts or standard textual content.

A BI dashboard is a data visualization tool that consolidates data to view metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), performance scorecards and more in one place. You can tailor the dashboard to show specific data targeted to single or multiple points of view or departments. One of the most important features of BI is the ability to customize and pull real-time information from different sources.

A variety of reporting analytics and other BI functions provide insight into the nitty-gritty details of your business. Different software offers different types of analytics tools for predictive, descriptive or prescriptive analysis.

Most give you options to configure customized dashboards for data visualization so you can interpret the data you’ve collected. Automated scheduling is also common, ensuring you’ll always have reports when you need them.

Create custom maintenance reports using Hippo CMMS. Source

• Reports Creation Tool
• Analytics Tool
• Configurable Dashboards
• Automated Report Scheduling

11. Capital Project and Program Management

Handling multiple and long projects requires a lot of planning and oversight. With this feature, you can manage budgets, plan new projects, renovations and expansions, and monitor everything to completion.

Typical capabilities let you track business processes, the renovation life cycle, expenses, requirements, vendors, labor, approvals and other project information. Furthermore, you can forecast project schedules by analyzing past performance, budgets and abort times. Import and export data to other external systems and use this data to create a master project plan.

• Project Management
• Project Tracking
• Project Forecasting
• Data Import & Export
• Project Portfolio Management

12. Environmental Sustainability and Energy Performance Analysis

You can monitor and track energy consumption, recycling, carbon emission, carbon footprint, greenhouse gas emission and water consumption to comply with environmental regulations.

With reporting, forecasts and analysis of stored information, you can identify consumption trends and understand the financial impact of new sustainability projects. You can also use this analysis to understand how to use your assets best and improve their life cycles.

• Environmental Sustainability Tracking
• Energy Management Tracking Tool
• Energy Performance Analysis

13. Real Estate Portfolio Management

This feature lets you link places, assets and people to get real-time updates on cost, leases and building measurements in a centralized hub. It’s important to know what your portfolio looks like and how to use it best, to ensure that you can organize, analyze and optimize it.

Real estate portfolio management includes ways to visualize your portfolio to view how you can generate revenue and understand where you’re incurring a loss. You can also use forecast tools to predict and prepare for the future needs and expenses of your space.

• Real Estate Portfolio Tracking
• Real Estate Portfolio Forecasting

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14. Document Administration

You can use an online, centralized system to upload, store and manage job, asset, lease and facility documents. This makes it easy to access all asset-related information and link them to the appropriate asset for easier maintenance. Storing documents also helps you prepare for auditing and go digital by reducing physical files.

You can plan, manage and control resources and capacity and analyze the progress of multiple projects. You can also prepare and predict budgets, compare costs, and improve cash flow management.

• Document Manager
• Facility Document Storage
• Capacity & Resource Planning
• Budgeting & Forecasting

15. Visitor Management

Visitor management tracks visitors to your facilities and sites, as well as online appointments and pre-registration. It offers things like scanning for registration, ID badges and digital check-in that captures visitor photos and signatures.

You can set the system to send alerts when visitors arrive and track visitors’ request progress. For security, it lets you restrict the level of employees that can access visitors’ information.

• Visitor Tracking
• Authorized Access Control
• Email Notifications
• Authorization Level Management

16. Transaction Management

Features for this component include transaction and lease initiation, site acquisition management, subleasing, dispositions, and termination. It lets you automate task and deadline management and perform complex transactions. You can easily manage schedules, costs, scopes, documents and more.

• Transaction Tracking
• Automated Transaction Management

17. Incident Management

Incident management helps you record requests and manage calls. You can assign and monitor reported problems through email, phone or online submissions, as well as respond to reservation and maintenance requests through a centralized web portal and record events and follow-ups.

Some systems offer call and email recording. You can customize the advanced search to view solutions and solution history for your users and receive automatic notifications once a service request is issued and as it progresses. This feature also supports SLA management.

• Help Desk Management/Service Request Management
• Facility Service Request Portal Knowledgebase
• Automated Email Notifications

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18. Key and Lock Management

Security is a major concern when managing a large facility or multiple facilities. With the help of key and lock management, you can select and authorize people to manage and track keys, cabinets, lock types and more.

This increases accountability, reduces the number of misplaced keys and tracks who accessed which locations. Role-based permissions let you secure or restrict access to limited users. It also offers features to maintain an audit trail and record everything in an activity log, making things easier to track and manage.

• Key Management
• Role-based Permissions
• Audit Trail

19. Time and Attendance

You can track and set time-in, time-out, overtime and late clocking exceptions. It allows you to generate, approve and reassign a roster, as well as link time and attendance tracking to roster management for effective and faster shift management.

This feature is useful for exporting and importing payroll data, processing leaves and managing workflows, providing a single platform for accurate calculations.

View leaves, shifts and more with eFACILITY’s time and attendance module. Source

• Time and Attendance Tracking
• Roster Management
• Payroll Processing

20. Invoice Management

Built-in invoicing allows you to create and approve equipment purchases for inventory and track the movement of the shipments. It offers purchase order conversion into invoices, automated processing and auto-approve rules.

• Purchase Order Management
• Invoice & Payment Status Tracking
• Automated Invoices Processing

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21. Transportation Management

Transportation management is meant to improve efficiency and reduce expenses with easy and faster tracking. You can use it to schedule trips, track requests for transportation, approve travel requests, and track mileage and trip timings. Some solutions offer a calendar view to help organize bookings and prevent duplicate or overlapping requests.

You can share trip details like a map, itinerary, directions and documents like licenses. You can schedule and track vehicle maintenance, inventory, repair cost and labor. It also helps improve communication by automatically sending notifications to the requester, approver and driver when someone sends, approves or changes a request.

• Transportation Scheduling
• Transportation Request Tracking
• Vehicle Maintenance & Request Form Tracking
• Photo and File Attachment Uploads
• Calendar View
• Automatic Notifications

22. Integration

It’s important to integrate all your systems and have a single point of access to achieve smooth operations. You can customize integrations based on your requirements and the systems you’re currently using.

Bi-directional integration with your financial systems helps store and access all the relevant data on a single platform. Building management system integration is one you should look for as well, as it checks faulty alarms or warning alarms. Another good choice is third-party space tracking systems to manage your facilities better. Other important integrations include HR software, asset tracking tools, preventive maintenance systems and labor tracking.

Finally, you need to be able to link photos, videos, documents and websites to ensure all asset-specific data is accessible together. When you transfer or send reports, analyses, bills or other such documents, you need to be able to convert the files to other formats like MS Excel and PDF.

• API, Web Service, EDI
• LDAP, AD, Single Sign-on
• Financial and ERP Software Integration
• Building Management System Integration
• Space Integration
• Movement Management Integration
• Multiple Integrations
• Media Integration
• MS Office Integration

23. Supporting Features

To make accessing information easier, you can create RFID tags and labels with specific locations, barcodes and more. When selecting software, it’s important to check if it accepts multiple input devices like scanners, gauges, keyboards, thermometers and more. You also need to ensure that it supports appropriate file types to transfer any type of data easily and quickly.

Generate unique barcodes and QR codes for assets using AHG. Source

• RFID Capabilities
• Multiple Data Label Generation
• Label Output Locations
• Input Devices
• File Type Support

24. Security

Data security is an important concern for facilities. When looking at solutions, check if they offer an administrative log to report on all the events and assets. Other features let you restrict certain areas, floors and facilities to certain managerial levels. Web access is also important to get information faster and ensure that multiple users can access real-time data from anywhere.

• Audit Trail
• Access Control
• Web Access
• Multi-user Network

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Next Steps

Now that you know what to look for in a facilities management system, check out our free requirements template for facilities management to build your own unique list of capabilities.

You can also use our comparison report to find the solutions that best match your unique set of needs.

Which facility management software features are most important to your business? Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments.