5 Reasons Your Ministry Should Use Facility Management Software

By Tim Cool, Smart Church Solutions

Ministry facilities are vital to teaching, training, and advancing the gospel. It’s important to keep them in peak condition. Facility management software can help you manage the daily tasks so your facilities are cleaner, more efficient, and ready to serve your people and community.

Regardless of whether your ministry is small or large, if your church or organization owns a facility, maintains a facility, or cares for a facility, you need facility management software.

What Is Facility Management Software?

Facility management software, also known as CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) is defined as a software package that maintains a computer database of information about an organization's maintenance operations.

In short, facility management software can assist with many things, but here are a few:

• Report corrective maintenance issues
• Track work performed, who performed it, and approved completion
• Schedule and assign preventative maintenance tasks
• Make it as easy as possible for users to submit work orders
• Track costs of labor, parts, etc.
• Manage internal and external vendors
• Review history logs
• Track inventory

Five Benefits of Facility Management Software

Facility management software helps facility staff perform at a higher level than they would without it. Here are five reasons your ministry can use facility management software to help you become more efficient and effective.

1.) Schedule Your Facilities Team

Your facility team, including employees and volunteers, can be more effective when they know what needs to be done and when it needs to be completed.  Church staff, especially the facility staff, often has many tasks at hand. It can become very cumbersome for them to organize and sort each task based on priority, nature, and relevance. Intentional facility management software provides an effective structure where details are outlined. It also notifies the team on what sort of service is needed. This helps clarify who is responsible for completing a specific task, keeping everything running smoothly.

An important feature is the ability to put a ‘priority’ tag on important work requests. This helps your team, including vendors and suppliers, to prioritize the high-importance tasks. There should not be any misunderstanding of what needs to be done along with the priority of the tasks at hand.

Facility management software also helps you keep documentation of the work completed. This helps you know if a specific piece of equipment is particularly troublesome or if your vendors are performing satisfactory work.

2.) Don’t Run Out of Toilet Paper

Church facility teams have a load of work to complete daily. Meanwhile, they forget about identifying the minimal, yet important, consumable inventories that require scheduled work orders. The absence of the stock of these essential items can be annoying and downright inconvenient (as in the case of no toilet paper).

If you utilize a facility management software with asset and inventory tracking capabilities, you can keep a close eye on the stocks of all the consumable and non-consumable items by setting up a notification system or a stock updating alarm-like system.

3.) Track Preventive Maintenance

Facility management software can identify, track, and address what is referred to as “corrective” maintenance. For instance, an example of corrective maintenance would be a clogged toilet in the kid’s wing.

One of the most critical types of maintenance for a church facility team to stay on top of is the “preventive” maintenance items. These are the recurring maintenance items that, if performed as needed or recommended, can extend the life of the system and equipment.

A few examples of preventive maintenance would be quarterly replacement of HVAC filters, annual water heater flushing, monthly elevator inspections, annual fire extinguisher inspections, and others.

The right facility management software can help keep you on track with reminders and auto-generated work orders. Preventive maintenance is an essential and critical aspect of any facility management and maintenance plan. Being a facility steward means you are looking at the future.

4.) Plan for Equipment Replacement

A proper facility management software helps show the Remaining Useful Life of all your major equipment and systems. It also shows the current replacement value, a rate of inflation and calculator as to how much money should be set aside annually so you have adequate funds when the time for replacement arrives.

With intentional and proactive Life Cycle Planning, your team, including your church administrator and finance team, should have this information at their fingertips so they can plan and budget appropriately.

5.) Control Your Costs

As facility stewards, we need to be intentional when spending the money entrusted to us with the same care as the entrusted facilities.

Considering that, you need a facility management software that can help you track the cost of work as well as the time it takes your team to perform the work. This allows you to fine-tune supplies, processes, and vendors to maximize your budget. You also can take a proactive approach to budgeting for facilities stewardship by downloading this free resource from Smart Church Solutions.

These are just the initial reasons why your church needs to have a proactive, easy-to-use, and effective facility management software. Smart Church Solutions, a company specializing in ministry facility stewardship, offers a program called eSPACE^®. Visit Smart Church Solutions to learn more and to start a free 30-day trial.

 

 

© 2021 Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company. All rights reserved.

The eSPACE name is owned by Cool Solutions Group, LLC and is used with permission by Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company.

Published January 27, 2021