‘Data, data everywhere but not a byte to sync’
This may have once been the rhyme of the entire facility management industry, but no more. Every experienced facility manager and service provider in the country is riding the data wave, surfing the crests of space occupancy and exploring the troughs of downtime, sailing on seas of terabytes of data gathered from distant facility locations and syncing their course with the path that the numbers plot for them. Numbers don’t lie, or do they?
Gathering data is Step 2, and the easiest one. It is a step worth taking only if one first carefully decides on what data needs to be gathered and why, and follows up with a methodical analysis of that data, to eliminate bias, subjectivity and human error.
It saves money. And time. And effort. And duplication of effort. And more.
So if data is indeed on everyone’s minds, why do so many of our respondents for this story still feel that it is paid only lip service? How do veteran facility managers arrive at what data needs gathering? Instead of working according to numbers, how do they make numbers work for them? And how – when they trust the analysis – do they allow it to influence their FM decisions, one way or the other, in real time?
Let them tell you themselves.