How to get started with the digital transformation of facility management

Digital transformation in Facility Management processes enables efficiency, cost reduction, and enhanced workplace experiences.

When it comes to digitally transforming Facility Management (FM), the majority of organizations already have a clear idea of their priorities. For example, moving to a more cost-effective, adaptable FM solution; enhancing existing FM software; implementing a digitized maintenance request catalog, room booking platform, or visitor system.

Here, we’ll explore organizations’ common needs when getting started with FM digital transformation, as well as how the Ask James FM software delivers on these.

Facility Management processes: Digitize visitor protocols

Evolving from on-paper visitor logs paves the way to increased efficiency, enhanced security, and improved experiences for both the visitors coming to your premises and the employees receiving them there.

If your premises require visitors to hold specific health and safety certifications to enter, for example, the documentation for these can be automatically emailed to visitors as soon as their appointment is logged in your system. Once they’ve gained the certification, it can be stored in their visitor record for rapid future reference.

Easy to set up, these types of Ask James capabilities streamline your visit protocols from end to end, eliminating hold-ups and time-consuming information gaps.

Facility data collection: Enhance insights into vendor service provision

Tired of searching through emails to keep track of whether your FM vendors are meeting your SLAs? With Ask James, monitoring these Facility Management processes becomes far easier.

Firstly, your employees can log maintenance issues or requests directly on the platform, rather than these having to be issued via your Facility Managers. This can even be done via QR codes located on or near each of your facility assets, so employees can access the relevant ticket-logging screen in seconds.

Secondly, having an incident overview in Ask James enables your Facility Managers to accurately track numbers of tickets, speed and effectiveness of vendor solutions, and other related data. With these insights from the Facility Management software, they’re empowered to accurately assess the value of the service your organization is receiving from each vendor, to ensure quality and cost-effectiveness per contract.

Thirdly, Ask James enables incident loggers (employees, Facility Managers) and incident resolvers (Facility Managers, vendors) to communicate on each ticket. Adding comments and updating the ticket status via their user accounts, this enables rapid, streamlined resolutions.

FM software: Enable digital floorplans

Ask James FM software enables you to add digital visualizations of your premises to the platform, for all your employees to access via desktop or mobile.

For employees, this facilitates quick and intuitive request logging to reserve certain meeting spaces or work zones. For Facility Managers, this enables monitoring space usage patterns and occupancy trends — made all the easier as they can track the bookings made spatially on these digital floorplans.

Smart technology: Easy integrations with your existing assets

As Ask James is built on ServiceNow, it inherently enables easy integration with your facility assets to rapidly share information.

Hardware (such as security cameras and entry barriers) and software (including financial, HR, and calendar programs, as well as your external vendors’ systems) can all be linked up to your Ask James platform. This enables you to create an intuitive hub to manage everything from visitor security clearance to the tickets assigned to external vendors.

Another major benefit of Ask James’ ServiceNow foundation is that, if your organization already has in-house ServiceNow knowledge, standard maintenance and smalls tweaks in your Ask James platform will be quick and easy to execute.

Digital transformation in FM: Gauge your workplace sustainability

With the sustainability tracking capabilities included in Ask James, you can convert various organizational activities and operations into their CO2 equivalent.

Tracking and reporting on kilometers driven per quarter, paper usage per department, and so on, enables you to analyze and improve on your workplace sustainability across multiple pillars.

Find your workplace’s ideal Facility Management software

Ready to take the next steps in identifying the right FM software to initiate your digital transformation? Download our Facility Management Software Buyer Guide to explore key criteria you should bear in mind.