Six of the best facilities management cost-saving strategies
Discover 6 cost-saving strategies for Facilities Management

Six of the best facilities management cost-saving strategies

Day-to-day operational costs are escalating, and new research shows the extent of FM budget cuts. As belts tighten, how can you keep on top of growing compliance and performance challenges with less money? Here are 6 ways it can be done.

New research from Watco has highlighted the extent of recent FM budget cuts. In a survey of 250 professionals, they found:

Watco research
What can Facilities Managers do to control their costs without compromising their future performance?

6 facility management cost-saving ideas to prioritise

1. Sort your Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM)

Responding quickly when vital equipment fails will minimise business disruption and downtime. PPM makes maintenance requirements more predictable and saves money on emergency call-outs. 

But preventive maintenance is not practised uniformly across companies:

Watco research

To build a functional PPM programme, you don't need expensive IoT for condition tracking, and it doesn't need to take months to set up. Instead, choose a 'mobile-first’ CAFM that can help you manage and implement maintenance schedules that your engineers and contractors can easily respond to. Choose a CAFM that lets you:

  • Customise service workflows with notifications and reminders
  • Report on outcomes of inspections and flag issues in real time via mobile
  • See upcoming and outstanding PPM and compliance tasks in your management dashboard

In a study of one retail business, the savings from proactively maintaining a single chiller unit using PPM gave a 545% ROI against the typical repair and replacement costs of a reactive approach. 

You can read more about implementing trouble-free, cost-saving PPM software, right here.

2. Manage your assets digitally

The software firm Sage suggests that up to 30% of fixed assets in a typical business cannot be accounted for. So, do you know how much lost, mislaid or badly maintained assets are costing you every year? 

  • Do you know where all your assets are located? Can you audit them regularly against your records? 
  • Are you insuring assets you no longer own?
  • Do you know the current value of the assets you control?
  • Do you know if they are compliant? 
  • Are you spending more money on maintenance than you would on replacements?
  • Are you paying unnecessary call-out and repair charges for assets still under warranty?  

Replacing a fragmented approach to asset management with a single source of asset truth is one of the most significant ways you can maintain and control maintenance spending, insurance costs and future Capex. Creating a digital asset register will bring greater compliance oversight and financial control to your operations, but choose your partner carefully, because it can be complex and time-consuming to set up and maintain. 

Our CAFM shows managers what we are spending on assets and where they could potentially drive new efficiencies. This is important because FM is a massive part of P&L in our business. Giving our workers these digital tools contributes to cost savings and increases profitability. Shakeel Jivraj - Head of Operations, Queensway Coffee Houses.

3. Automate your work orders

What takes up the most time of Facility Management's week? The repetitive but essential admin tasks that keep the whole show on the road. Days and weeks of FM time can be spent triaging and responding to emails and phone calls, manually maintaining the workflows that really should be automated. 

No wonder so many FM teams feel overworked and undervalued when they can’t free themselves from the avalanche of emails and ringing phones:

How can you focus on preventive maintenance and budget planning, if you’re spending so much time time chasing contractor callouts, organising quotes, managing internal resources and keeping the communication flowing?

The solution?

Choose a CAFM system that can streamline your work order management, automate data capture, prioritisation, triage and the way you seek and filter quotes from contractors.

But make sure your workflows can be changed and adapted to fit the specific needs of your business or you’ll be wasting time and money changing your process to match supplier templates:

We wanted more of a personalised service from our FM partner, rather than just buying an off-the-shelf piece of software that we’d have to ‘work around’. We wanted to appoint a supplier who would really understand our needs and personalise a CAFM to our individual requirements. Dave Rich - Facilities Director, TeamSport.

4. Streamline your teams with a centralised help desk

With a centralised, digital help desk, you can build a team that works the way you need it to. Take your team virtual with FM software, and employ the people you want wherever they are located. Cut down on required office space and streamline staffing requirements through advanced automation.

Centralising the help desk has helped us utilise our labour better.  I don’t need as many people and I can recruit from anywhere. They can all work together using our CAFM as one team, remotely. Alan Jones - Activate Learning Group.

5. Control your supply chain

A lack of supply chain visibility can be hugely expensive for your business. Many FMs have procured hundreds of suppliers and contractors over the years which they manage via spreadsheets or simply ‘in their heads’.  

Mobilising a CAFM will help you understand, maybe for the first time, where suppliers are bringing you value for money and where they are wasting time and failing to deliver.

It could help you monitor KPIs and consolidate lists of suppliers to optimise performance and save on waste:

With our new CAFM, we can do real appraisals with our engineers and contractors. We know how many jobs they’ve been given and how many they’ve completed. We didn’t have that data before. We couldn't challenge or reward them on the basis of their performance. Greg Plummer - Facilities Helpdesk Manager, Fitness First.

6. Control your energy use

Manual and paper administration costs time and the environment. Shifting to electronic facilities management can eliminate a whole layer of form-filling and paper bureaucracy that generates waste. But CAFMs can also help you monitor key energy and asset KPIs to meet tougher environmental regulations.

  • Extend asset lifecycle: Using PPM software can reduce failure rate and the need to scrap equipment.
  • Use FM data to maintain, monitor and optimise energy consumption of critical assets
  • Plan the movement of engineers and contractors to reduce carbon footprint
  • Integrate Building Management and CAFM systems to access and control more energy-use data

Shifting to a CAFM is the best way to create a centralised and risk-free way of working in this sector, but it’s also a key ESG objective.  We needed the digital tools that could work across every device to reduce our reliance on paper and meet our environmental goals. Gary Raffray - IT and Facilities Manager, the Hamptons Hospital.

Consolidate control with a CAFM

If your FM communication and data is spread across different platforms and applications, it’s a recipe for chaos and confusion. Using multiple platforms can cause you to lose documentation, duplicate work, overwrite data and spend hours every day searching for vital information.  

This can slow maintenance down, threaten compliance, drag out audits and waste money.

Before we implemented our CAFM, a third of every working week was wasted on admin that could and should be automated. It was dangerous for our business. Shakeel Jivraj - Head of Operations, Queensway Coffee Houses.

Making a business case for investment

As many C-Suite' executives look to tighten their FM belts there is a risk that they will further stretch already massively busy FMs. But a good business case for a CAFM can demonstrate the efficiency and cost savings you will make through automation and show the potential ROI in clear black and white terms. A good business case will show how CAFM platform can save you time, money and resource once it is up and running. It will show how you will  take complete control and oversight of your budgets, assets, people and processes to drive profits. Without a plan of action to digitise your FM function, and with more budget cuts on the horizon, businesses risk being plunged further into the dark about the condition and performance of their facilities and assets.

Watco research

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

Choose a CAFM system and a supplier that can help you plan, prioritise and implement the features that will start impacting your bottom line right away.  From a strong foundation of work order automation and data management, you can build long-term digital controls that will deliver greater cost reductions over time.


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