CMMS for facility management

Facility management isn’t maintenance under another name. It’s the integrated management of the services for a building or a portfolio of buildings: maintenance, yes, but also cleaning, security, landscaping, access control, waste and utilities.

That changes the system’s approach in three ways: there are many different services on the same property, almost all of them are executed by third parties, and everything has to be justified to whoever is paying.

The building as a structure, not an address

The first thing is that the building has to exist in the system with its full breakdown. A building isn’t a single point: it’s floors, zones, premises and the systems that serve them.

In asset management, assets are grouped by system, family and model, and hang off their address and their client. That lets you report by building, by floor or by system, which is how information gets requested in this sector.

Each asset with its model, serial number, installation date, warranty end date, priority and whatever custom fields it needs. And with its QR code, which in a portfolio of buildings solves the problem of identifying exactly which piece of equipment is being discussed.

Many services, one record

The trait that defines facility management: very different jobs coexist on the same building, with different schedules and different owners.

They’re all managed the same way: an inspection plan linked to the asset, the system or the family, a frequency, and preventive maintenance generates the work orders on its own. Scheduled cleaning of an area, an HVAC unit inspection and pruning a planter are, from the system’s point of view, the same thing: recurring work with its checklist and its owner.

Putting them all inside has an advantage that isn’t organizational but evidentiary: the monthly report to the client comes from a single place, with the same format and the same traceability.

Subcontractors are the operation

In facility management, most of the work is carried out by third parties. If they work outside the system, there’s no service: there’s just a list of invoices.

Providers are set up with their associated warehouses and receive the orders that belong to them, logging time, materials, documentation and signature just like in-house staff. Since licenses are unlimited on all three plans, registering every subcontractor isn’t a financial decision —and under a per-user model it would be, which is exactly what leads to sharing accounts and losing traceability.

There’s also a connector between GMAO Cloud installations that works both ways, from client to subcontractor and back, so work moves from one system to the other without an intermediate file and keeps its traceability when it crosses the boundary between the two companies.

That detail matters more in facility management than in any other sector, because the chain usually has three links: the owner, the manager and the executor.

Service levels

What was sold wasn’t “maintenance”: it was deadlines and frequencies committed to by contract.

Issues carry their type and subtype, their priority, the client, the address and the zone, and statuses can have an associated maximum time. There’s an SLA entity with its name, its priority and its limit, and incident timings are recorded.

With that, overdue items show up in a list instead of being discovered at the monthly meeting, and afterward you can measure response time and resolution time separately, which is how these contracts get audited.

Letting the building’s users report issues

Whoever spots the problem is someone who works there, not the facility team. If the only channel is calling, half of it gets lost and what arrives comes with no information.

A report can come in from the backend, from client access with a description and photo, or from a mailbox the system empties and turns into issues, with a separate mailbox per service type if needed.

And the client, from that same access, follows the status of their orders, downloads reports and sees their upcoming preventive visits on a calendar. A good part of the admin work in a facility contract is tracking where each thing stands; this removes it.

The monthly report

This is the sector’s real deliverable, and it’s what the contract renewal hinges on.

Reports give the executed annual plan —how many jobs were scheduled and how many got done—, hours per client and per provider, response and resolution times by priority, cost per building and per system, and detected anomalies.

That turns the monthly meeting into a data review instead of a discussion of perceptions. And when it’s time to renegotiate, the data on which building consumes more and why is the argument.

The building’s documentation

Official inspection certificates, contracts for each service, insurance, authorizations, licenses, technical data sheets.

Document management hangs them off the building, the asset, the client, the provider or the order, decides who sees them and sets an expiry date, with a daily check on what’s about to expire and its corresponding alert.

In a portfolio of buildings, that alert is what prevents the problem money can’t fix: a mandatory inspection expired at a property no one was watching.

Worth knowing that legal maintenance isn’t a module: it’s achieved with the preventive maintenance mechanism, and the proof comes from the history, the checklists and this documentation. The software records and demonstrates; the one accountable to the regulation is the owner.

The in-house team

For the part executed internally, technicians are grouped into teams with their supervisor, and planning is done against shifts, working days, vacations and holidays in staff management.

From the app the technician sorts their orders by route using GPS —in a scattered portfolio, travel is the big line item—, has the equipment’s history in front of them and logs time with a stopwatch. And it works without coverage, which is normal in technical rooms and rooftops.

Where to start

With one complete building, all its services and providers set up, not with the whole portfolio and a single service. Within weeks there’s a monthly report you can show, and that’s the argument for expanding it.

There’s more on contract management in third-party maintenance. If you’d like to see it with one of your own buildings, you can request a demo.