Effective cost-saving ideas for Facilities Management processes

Facility Management (FM) process optimization is vital to streamlining costs in any organization. To leverage FM software to both save money and create a more efficient workplace, we can start with answering a few key questions:

• Are the premises you currently occupy being used to their maximum, or barely populated?
• Can your vendor costs be streamlined?
• Can you leverage Facility Management software to engage your employees in enhancing your workplace efficiency?

Below, we explore Facility Management cost-saving ideas aligned with these core questions, to set you on your path to smart, cost-cutting FM.

Building management: Save money on square meters

Reducing the surface area that your organization requires allows you to access the largest cost savings possible. With smart FM software such as Ask James, you’ll be primed to effectively manage your spaces, mapping employee on-premise attendance and facility usage patterns to identify whether you do, in fact, need the full space that you currently occupy.

Smart technology also enables you to implement an intuitive, user-friendly workspace reservation system, supporting you to guide employees to make more efficient use of your organization’s premises. With insights into how many of your workspaces, parking spaces, and so on are used and when, as well as whether you’re reaching maximum capacity, you’ll be positioned to strategically downsize as needed.

In addition, Ask James enables chargeback for space usage, catering, and other vendor services per department within your organization, enabling you to accurately assign overall costs. You’ll also be able to track asset-related incidents and associated costs that are logged per department, for enhanced insights into your organization’s overall facilities maintenance and usage patterns.

Automation and digitalization: Evolve your vendor processes

With Ask James FM software, you’re able to auto-assign tickets directly to your vendors, bypassing your Facilities Department or any intermediary FM organizations you might have needed to work with previously. This shortens your FM chain, with the aim of improving vendor response times, cost-effectiveness, and transparency.

Evolving this closer, digitized connection to your FM vendors, you’ll also be able to configure notifications within Ask James to implement preventive and predictive maintenance plans. A proactive approach to incident prevention often helps cut maintenance costs overall, as well as limit any expensive emergency incident tickets.

Employee engagement: Encourage an efficient workplace

With Ask James FM software, you’re able to track your employees’ behavior, guiding them to contribute to an efficient workplace through implementing a combination of rewards and sanctions.

For example, perhaps an employee reserves a meeting space but then doesn’t turn up for the booking. That creates inefficiency, as another employee could have used the space instead. So a sanction would be logged on the booker’s profile, reminding them that it’s vital to either utilize the bookings that they make or cancel them in time for the space to be used by another colleague.

Save money while designing an efficient workplace

To explore how to identify the right FM software option for your organization, download our Facility Management Software Buyer Guide.