By Shreeya Mishra
Ensuring a campus is safe, secure, and state-of-the-art requires more than just traditional facilities management systems in place. The shift towards connected Enterprise Asset Management system has proven to be the ultimate game-changer, offering real-time visibility, seamless integration, and enhanced flexibility that traditional FSM tools lack. By embracing a connected EAM system, campuses can experience streamlined operations, heightened efficiency, improved technician management, reduced inventory costs, and elevated customer satisfaction levels. These benefits ultimately contribute to better returns on investment and a safer environment for students and staff. As educational institutions work towards meeting the high standards set by Gen Zs and their discerning parents, prioritizing campus management software becomes imperative. This investment not only ensures optimized scheduling, automation, security, and analytics but also caters to the evolving needs of the modern campus experience. Whether you're overseeing a university or providing facilities management services, the responsibility lies in maintaining campuses diligently while ensuring a substantial return on technology investments.
Often, campuses face the challenge of legacy systems and fragmented workflows, which complicates maintenance management. This results in a more complex process than necessary. Some of the typical difficulties campuses experience in their daily facilities maintenance and management include:
Fragmented Systems
Dealing with separate software applications for HVAC monitoring, lighting control tools, and handling canteen maintenance via emails and calls can lead to errors and inefficiencies in managing multiple systems. This can divert valuable time away from important tasks. Additionally, extracting data from disparate systems requires manual effort, leading to reduced accuracy of the data. Campuses face challenges with accountability, communication gaps, and labour intensive processes due to these fragmented systems.
Unhappy Employees and Students
A survey reveals that both staff and students are dissatisfied with work challenges, including a lack of technical personnel for maintenance, burnout, and retention issues. The complexity of managing multiple tools and processes for asset tracking and maintenance scheduling overwhelms staff. When work orders are delayed or services are missed, residents and students suffer, leading to unhappy staff, underperforming assets, and a negative impact on operational costs and institution reputation.
Elevated Expenses for Upkeep
Outdated facilities management systems can lead to increased maintenance costs and inefficiencies, resulting in reactive maintenance practices where issues are only addressed after they have escalated. This can lead to higher energy bills and strain annual budgets. By upgrading facilities management systems, campuses can improve day-to-day operations, enhance the quality of life for students, and extend the lifespan of structures in a cost-effective manner.
An Enterprise Asset Management System has the ability to enable campus facilities management teams to centrally oversee the different components of their institution efficiently and promptly. The following are the primary areas in which an Enterprise Asset Management System can enhance facilities management within a campus.
Maintenance from Start to Finish
Implementing an Enterprise Asset Management System in campus maintenance operations can transform task management. This centralized platform allows for efficient organization of campus services and automated workflows. With streamlined request tracking and work order generation, technicians can be allocated quickly for timely responses. Mobile capabilities enable technicians to work offline, enhancing productivity. Effective inventory management ensures parts availability to prevent downtime. Proactive purchasing strategies can reduce costs, and vendor lifecycle management optimizes service quality while controlling expenses. Embracing an Enterprise Asset Management System is the key to achieving high-quality maintenance services at minimized costs for your campus, paving the way for seamless operations and enhanced outcomes.
High-Quality Asset Management
Campus facilities teams need impeccable asset management to efficiently handle the numerous assets under their care. Manual processes are not reliable in this case, and timely and competent asset management is crucial for budget management and extending the life of critical assets. Tools and platforms that provide real-time data on asset performance, history, and usage patterns are essential for forecasting expenses and mitigating unexpected costs. Predictive maintenance has been proven to provide a 3X benefit to organizations, by limiting the impact of damaged assets, extending their life, and improving ROI. An Enterprise Asset Management System offers data-driven capabilities for campuses to enhance asset reliability and effectively manage costs.
Visibility through Dashboards and Reports
Campus facilities management teams have benefited greatly from the high visibility provided by dashboards and reports. Having access to all important data in one place has enabled proactive decision-making, leading to improved workforce morale, better resource optimization, and cost savings. Tailored reports offer detailed tracking of KPIs and productivity analysis, while customized dashboards allow team members to access real-time information on service requests, vendor performance, maintenance issues, and resolution times. This has resulted in enhanced efficiency and informed decision-making for campus facilities management teams.
Advancing Towards Enhanced Energy Efficiency
Taking firm steps towards energy efficiency is crucial for creating greener and more sustainable campuses. By focusing on building energy efficiency, campuses have the opportunity to lead the way in advocating for carbon-neutral environments. Implementing an Enterprise Asset Management System can provide campuses with real-time monitoring of energy and emission data. This enables institutions to effectively track, understand, and benchmark energy consumption across their entire portfolio. By utilizing this system, campuses can take predictive action to ensure alignment with sustainability standards and regulations, and continuously drive performance improvements. This proactive approach not only enhances operational efficiency but also contributes to a more environmentally friendly and sustainable campus ecosystem.
Nirmalya Suite emerges as an essential solution catering to the demands of campus facility management. It offers a sophisticated array of features designed to enhance the efficiency and performance of managing campus facilities. By providing tools for work order management, preventive maintenance scheduling, and resource optimization, this suite brings about a new level of control and organization in facility management. The real-time monitoring capabilities further refine the process, allowing for swift identification and resolution of maintenance issues. Additionally, it’s reporting and analytics functionalities empower decision-makers to make informed choices, driving overall efficiency and effectiveness. Nirmalya Suite epitomizes a streamlined approach to facility management, ensuring that campus facilities operate optimally and are meticulously maintained.
Nirmalya Suite's Enterprise Asset Management plays a crucial role in helping campuses streamline Operations and Maintenance (O&M) processes efficiently. By utilizing the features of Nirmalya Suite, campuses can prioritize maintenance work based on the criticality of equipment or machinery. The suite offers various tools such as numeric fields for assets with health, safety, or environmental impacts, and user-definable priority fields that enhance flexibility in managing maintenance tasks. Additionally, Nirmalya EAM can evaluate the likelihood of failure and relative risk, allowing businesses to proactively schedule maintenance activities. By identifying critical assets from non-critical ones, enterprises can concentrate their resources and efforts on ensuring the optimal performance of the most vital assets. This strategic approach not only improves operational efficiency but also reduces downtime and risks, ultimately leading to a smoother and more streamlined O&M process.
Nirmalya Suite's EAM, incorporating Artificial Intelligence and Business Intelligence, offers unmatched flexibility in setting up preventive maintenance protocols with customizable checklists. By utilizing AI-enabled prescriptive maintenance, the system can help conduct thorough initial asset investigations, resulting in the quick creation of tickets to address any identified issues. These actions are based on input data from operators or gathered through SCADA and IoT devices. Nirmalya Dashboard and Analytics are crucial tools for campuses, enabling effective asset management strategies that optimize asset uptime and increase profitability. This comprehensive approach not only streamlines asset maintenance operations but also improves overall operational efficiency, in line with industry best practices to support continuous business growth. To learn how Nirmalya Suite can benefit campuses like yours, please contact us today!