Audit tracking: A new norm in facilities management.

Facilities management is a complex process involving multiple stakeholders and strategies driven by metrics and data. The core focus is managing real estate assets, equipment, and people while improving the efficiency of real estate assets, including buildings, grounds, and asset infrastructure.?

Organizations are continuously looking for ways to improve processes by reducing lead times, increasing yields, and decreasing costs. The need for performance improvement in every department of an organization is more critical today than ever.

Whether a first-time manager or an experienced professional, it takes time to keep abreast of any responsibilities daily.?Tracking the details of tasks is essential for effectively managing your time and resources while meeting organizational objectives. A facility audit tracking system is an independent investigation of activities and performance to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability.?

This article will explore ways audit tracking can benefit facilities management in the digital age. Keep reading to discover more!

?What is a facilities management audit?

Central to the Quality Assurance program, a facilities management audit is a thorough examination of an organization’s facilities operations. The audit may include the following:?

• an analysis of the facility’s current state,
• an evaluation of its goals, and
• a review of the operational performance of the facility.

The audit may also include a review of the policies and procedures, staffing levels, and budget, identifying inefficiencies, redundancies, and areas of weakness. An audit can create a facilities management action plan and guide future decisions related to the organization’s facilities operations.

The philosophy behind the audit type and schedule is a multi-tiered approach that ensures its importance to the equipment/infrastructure/ process depending on the associated criticality or risk. Audits allow comparing an organization’s performance to industry standards giving a benchmark for future evaluation and areas for improvement.

The Foundation of Audit Tracking.

Audit tracking follows real-time data tracking on various operations at a facility. This data comes from multiple sources tracking the hours worked on operational activity using timesheets and digital time clocks. Logging in the data allows accurate calculations and monitoring of the hours spent on specific projects, including work conducted by vendors or contractors, how the facilities operate, anomalies in the ventilation system, and access privileges throughout different buildings on the property.?

Fundamentals of a facilities management Audit Tracking.

A facilities management audit tracking is like taking a snapshot of your facility to help you understand the state of your facilities, ensuring your customers receive high-quality service and experience, operational effectiveness, identifying inefficiencies for areas for improvement, and strengths and weaknesses within your FM practices.

1) Assess the current state:?

Review the facility’s mission, goals, objectives, legacy practices, processes, and procedures; workplace risk assessment, which covers the evaluation of methods to cover hazards relating to work sites, equipment, and activities.?

2) Create a hypothesis:

• Create a hypothesis based on the assessment addressing the above mission, goals, and objectives.?
• Essentially, this hypothesis is your “best guess” to improve the facility. Build a comprehensive audit tracking schedule into the O&M plan.?
• The program should indicate the frequency of audits conducted, individuals responsible for inspecting, reviews, and observations, if any, are recorded.?

3) Gather data:

• Gather data to back up the findings by conducting interviews, surveys, and focus groups and reviewing industry best practices.
• Evolve the operations agenda based on the parameters such as asset maintenance and lifecycle management, engineering services, soft services delivery, and statutory compliance for labor and vendor compliance levels.?
• Collect trends and metrics to understand root causes and establish a performance baseline.?

4) Analyze data:??

• Analyze data to reveal trends and insights. Be sure to use reliable and accurate data.?
• Facilities teams on all accounts/sites must track and assign priority and criticality ratings to every observation.?
• The liquidation of issues must be taken up as per the priority and tracked to closure.?

5) Create action plans:?

• Create an action plan for your facility to address your hypothesis and include steps for improvement.?
• Develop roadmaps for all workforce, governance models, standard procedures, assets, and manage replacement, upgrade, and disposal cycles for underperforming assets.?

6) Benchmarking:?

When assessing the facility’s services, identify a benchmark against data about similar or the same facility, industry, or market segment. Critical metrics for assessing FM services are:

• Compare the energy consumption per unit area with other facilities similar in size, location, and operation.
• Current operational performance compared to earlier year or season.?
• Growth of occupancy in the building and its impact on the increase in expenses and vice versa.
• The efficiency of resource utilization to understand how effectively your organization uses its resources.
• The level of risk in operating regimes to assess the risks associated with equipment failure, ergonomic risk factors, and local and global risks.?

Benefits of Audit Tracking.

1) Manpower requirement:?

Workforce hours are one of the most fundamental aspects of facilities management. Therefore, track them in real-time. Audit tracking records the working hours, allowing a quick and accurate calculation of the workload distribution throughout the operational activities. Assigning the projects to FM teams provides monitoring of who is working on what projects, following the estimated time to complete each task, basic scheduling capabilities for renovation and maintenance work, and reassigning teams if a project goes over time.?

2) Rapid responsiveness of the equipment and assets:

Assets and equipment need a way to keep track of their location, records/documents for indicating the equipment’s health at the time of recording, and to assist in analyzing the operational data to identify trends or help investigate failures. Audit tracking helps keep tabs on the areas of these items and their state of frequently repeating faults, repairs, or maintenance by creating specific projects designed for tracking equipment’s health and maintenance activities.?

3) Risk and compliance:?

Throughout the operations period, the audit tracking of the operating regimes manages the risks associated with equipment or asset failure. It analyzes risk and measures the probability and consequences of failures consistently. It ensures that all equipment operates on the designed parameters and the manufacturer’s recommendations.?

4) Energy Consumption:

Energy Audit Tracking identifies opportunities to capture real-time data, power factor improvements to ensure accuracy, and inefficiency in the building systems built over time to bring them back to peak performance. Audit Tracking also addresses specific issues exposing a wide range of unknown challenges associated with occupancy, building use, peaks in utility usage such as early detection of improved set points, schedule misalignments, unnecessary uninterrupted lightening, leakages, times when production capacity falls below equipment capacity.

5) Forecasting budget and optimizing costs:?

Financial Audit Tracking helps managers plan for the current spending and anticipate expenses. Historical trend reports offer the ability to manage and review the expenditures against the budget for operations and maintenance, understand the budget and actions/decisions of choosing the right vendors, the right amount of money spent on utilities, impact on the cash flow, and multi-year capital planning.??

?Summing up

Many operations take place at once; it can often take time for organizations to keep track of all their various initiatives. Facing increasing pressure to streamline operations and optimize costs wherever possible is the goal; companies of all sizes are now struggling to optimize their processes and uncover inefficiencies.?

Revolutionizing by digital technologies, companies maintain facilities and other operations with new tools, platforms, and software solutions available. To this end, many organizations are implementing new-age audit tracking systems that can record detailed data on every function within the business. These tracking systems, also known as audit tracking systems, help businesses keep track of essential data about their operation and serve as trackers for a company’s various moving parts, from shipping and packing to maintenance and security.

Audit tracking measures operations’ progress and identifies areas for improvement with an objective review of an organization’s facilities operations and offers insight and recommendations based on the findings. While it identifies inefficiencies, redundancies, and areas of weakness, it also allows you to compare your facility’s performance against industry standards to drive operational excellence.?

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