Facility management nowadays has little or nothing to do with what it used to be a few decades ago. Back then, this activity related to the maintenance of the buildings and not much else. However, now we are faced with enormous challenges to ensure the best infrastructure performance and services in airports, large office buildings, hospital complexes, or industries. Indoor positioning means for facility management an answer to overcome its challenges through geolocation.
Even though it is difficult to explain what the management of large indoor spaces entails, we could say that the term facility management relates to the organisation of the infrastructure and space as well as the staff coordination. The goal is to ultimately “guarantee the safety, comfort, productivity, and sustainability of those places in which people work, play, study, or live in.”
But as buildings become larger and intelligent, their management has become more and more complex. This is why an indoor positioning system that integrates indoor navigation with monitorization of workforces becomes a very useful tool for facility management because it allows to have a clear vision of the space and critical data. And it is that, unlike many software solutions, an indoor positioning system not only solves one problem: it allows to tackle the many challenges that indoor space management poses without adding complexity to it.
1. Knowing facilities in depth
The cartography on top of which an indoor navigation and monitorization system is deployed is a powerful tool to catalogue all the information about the facilities, a tool that can be easily accessible anytime, anywhere. Once it’s customised and adapted to the manager’s specific needs, it can become a roadmap to daily information if the person is in charge of a large space like a corporate office or a convention centre.
A dynamic map of your building allows you to have a clear vision of the facilities. Zooming in on the map will make points of interest appear more clearly, showing all the information related to the building and, in this way, you will be able to access data like, for example, what stores are located in certain parts of an airport; how many people fit in a meeting room or what technical equipment is available in each room.
The different elements included on a map may appear depending on the zoom level. A store may appear from a certain zoom and a fire extinguisher from another. In this way, you will always have a clear vision of the space, no matter how many Points of Interest there are.
2. Guarantee a safe work environment
Part of the functions of a management team is to ensure that the workplace is safe and adequate for the type of tasks that are going to take place there. At this point, the system makes the visualisation of all equipment and necessary resources easy in order to respond promptly when it is needed: fire hoses, fire extinguishers, emergency exits… Everything can be added to the map as a Point of Interest so they can be easily found by all members of staff that have access to this information.
Situm MRM, the solution to manage staff through geolocation, includes two intelligent alarms: Panic Button and Man Down Alert. These alerts activate or detect any emergency situation quickly, as well as the location that triggers a notification in the system’s control panel. This way, indoor positioning for facility management adds a new layer to the building’s security.
3. Facilitate an agile maintenance
As a facility manager, it is necessary to make sure that basic infrastructures are always in good condition and that proactive maintenance is being done. This gets exponentially more complicated the bigger and more complex the facility is, where access by maintenance teams can delay any repairs if they don’t know the building.
With Situm’s indoor positioning system it is possible to share the exact location of the equipment that needs repairing with any person that has the system in their smartphone. This allows them to arrive there and solve the problem quickly.
4. Smart management of the space in real time
Finding what you’re looking for and getting to where you want to go seems simple, right? Well, it is not always so simple. If an office building has more than 100 meeting rooms, but only a dozen are available, how can employees find them? What if there are mobile workstations? Most employees in a large office would waste a lot of time trying to find a meeting room, but it doesn’t need to be like that.
By integrating the indoor positioning system in a meeting room booking system, staff can get a quick overview on the availability of the spaces nearby. Moreover, it allows for readjustments on the go. If a meeting room has been booked but it doesn’t register any activity on the first 10 minutes, it automatically becomes available for someone else.
5. Rethink space in order to get the most of it
Situm’s indoor positioning for facility management also means the tracking of the use of the facilities to analyse if people is making the most out of all spaces inside them. Through the analytics that the system provides (geolocation density, trajectories…), the management team can sort out space planning or resource assignment mistakes. This information helps to optimise the design and ensure a full use of the facilities.
6. Quick implementation and easy integration
Being a facility manager nowadays is impossible without technology. However, a technology excess can quickly become a waste of time if it relies on many systems that are not integrated with each other.
The deployment of Situm’s systems, without dedicated infrastructure, allows it to not interfere with other installed solutions. The Rest APIs, included in their platform, allow its integration with other geolocation or corporate management systems already used by companies.
These are only a few examples of how indoor navigation is improving facility management. If you wish to know more about our solutions for the management of facilities through geolocation, don’t hesitate to contact us.
