The advantages of holistic facilities management

Beyond the traditional challenges of today’s markets, many organizations must also address the challenges of real estate and facilities management. These issues include managing rising real estate costs, increasing lease rates, new sustainability goals and under-utilized hybrid work environments.

Successfully managing your facilities can directly impact employee productivity and customer satisfaction. Facilities management plays a role in the ongoing cost of the operation of your facility, its lifespan and its energy consumption, as well as how you optimize the use of your facility.

Too many businesses look at facilities from individual silos. Operations is concerned with facility maintenance, finance evaluates buildings from a cost perspective and business management fixates on employee productivity. But who in your organization is responsible for breaking down silos across teams and looking at your facilities from a more holistic viewpoint?

Individual solutions have advantages. They’re smaller to implement, don’t require consensus, are generally lower in acquisition cost and are usually easier to understand because they address only one problem. But point solutions don’t leverage common data or connect across your entire business operation, let alone produce a company-wide, easily digestible report on the state of your facility.

Building your own integrated environment with custom linkages between individual solutions presents new challenges. Developing and maintaining custom linkages often comes with a high price tag and usually doesn’t provide competitive benefits. In some cases, it even limits your ability to leverage any new capabilities that may be offered by your solution providers.

Successful organizations want the best of both: an integrated solution they can buy (not build) that can be implemented in logical phases to address their most pressing challenges and then grow over time. They want to treat their facilities as more of a strategic investment rather than just a necessary expense. So, there has been a growing adoption of more holistic real estate and facility management solutions. This approach not only enables successful facilities management processes but also builds an extensive single source of truth for your  real estate and facilities portfolio. This data repository is  invaluable for audits, acquisitions and divestitures, capital planning, lease management and evaluations.

IBM TRIRIGA Essential offerings provide a best-of-breed, focused solution that is part of the holistic architecture of TRIRIGA. This solution includes space management and reservations, capital planning and Facility Condition Assessment (FCA), or service and workorder management. These Essential packages offer the entry price of a focused solution with the capability to expand seamless management across the entire facility lifecycle.

These TRIRIGA Essential offerings enable your company to start with a ‘point like’ solution based on a holistic foundation. These solutions can easily be extended to other areas of facilities management while leveraging and expanding the shared facilities management data repository.

Source: ibm.com