It wasn’t too long ago that facility management meant being inundated with paper. Work orders, time sheets, equipment status, safety and quality inspections. Everything had to be written down, tracked, updated, and reported on manually. That left a lot of room for human error and information gaps, as well as inefficiencies. It also meant that decisions couldn’t be based on real-time data. Too often, they were shaped on outdated or anecdotal information.
Now facility services, like much in the business world, runs on data. Or rather, it can. With new technologies like IoT (Internet of Things), sensors, artificial intelligence, mobility, satellite, and cloud-based solutions becoming ever-more affordable and prevalent, it’s easy to gather the accurate, real-time information needed to drive smarter decisions, better planning, greater efficiencies, and high-quality facility services.
That’s why UG2 encourages our customers to take advantage of technologies like these, and why data and solutions design is central to all our engagements.
Here are a few of the many ways we leverage data for customers:
Delivering Pristine and Healthy Facilities
Ensuring that our customers’ facilities are clean and safe has always been a top priority for UG2. Now with COVID-19, it’s more urgent than ever. Data plays a key role in making this happen. We can utilize real-time building occupancy and traffic data, collected by sensors, to determine how often, where, and when to clean and disinfect surfaces, refill soap, hand sanitizer, and paper towel dispensers, remove trash, change HVAC system filters, and more. Getting all of this right is critical to giving occupants, employees, and business owners the confidence needed to return to offices, schools, retail, hospitality, and entertainment establishments.
Streamlining Work Order and Asset Management
When work orders are written on paper and stored in file cabinets, it’s almost impossible to collate and analyze information. Mobility technologies, however, make it easy to collect and leverage electronic data for tasks like work order and asset management. Our technicians obtain electric, gas, and water meter readings by scanning asset QR codes with smartphones during their rounds. By pulling that plant log data, which is stored in the cloud, into an analytic platform, we can see usage levels, anticipate when repairs may be needed, take steps to proactively prevent equipment breakdowns, and help customers determine when run-to-fail makes more sense than repairs.
Ensuring the Right Labor
To deliver quality services, you need to have the right people spending the right amount of time performing the jobs customers engage us to do. Estimating how many hours will be needed for each task is as critical as it is challenging. You must look at every task from every possible angle. By gathering asset management data and integrating information about labor training, administrative time, vacation hours, local licensing requirements and more, we’re able to perform comprehensive labor needs analyses, determine accurate person hours and costs, and help customers plan better, adjust priorities when needed, and build business cases.
Driving Efficiencies
There are always ways to drive greater efficiencies. Data can help identify areas for improvement. For instance, when technicians use their smartphones to scan QR codes, it also logs the time they arrived at and left the asset. By analyzing how much time is spent at each place, we can determine whether there are opportunities for streamlining processes. We also encourage customers to take advantage of facial recognition clocks instead of manual timecards to save time. Proactive measures like these enable us to drive more productivity for our customers.
The Right Data
With so much data available these days, the challenge is making sure the right data is collected and that you’re not so overwhelmed by data that you can’t strategically leverage it for business decision-making. UG2 ensures the right data is gathered and eliminates data deluge by collaborating with each customer on a data management strategy that supports their business goals, cost management parameters, and long-term performance metrics. We use the latest technologies to filter through and manage the data, alert stakeholders to urgent issues, and provide data visualization dashboards that make it easy to share and report on facility services performance.
The data we use on our customers’ behalf is generated and owned by our customers. Being able to access this sensitive and proprietary information is critical to delivering the highest-quality facility services. We’re humbled by the trust our customers put in UG2’s commitment and ability to secure and protect their data and use it wisely.
Contact us today to learn more about our uniquely data-driven approach to facility services.