Determine the right tools for your Facility-Management processes, before making any choice for your CAFM-System or your CAFM-solution!
Time, effort and the human factor
The “soft factors”…
Among other things IT can and should make working easier, help optimizing processes, reduce response times and enhance the quality of information. The systems, however, provide good results only under the condition that all parameters and the basis of the data are equally good. That is not always the case, though.
Often so called “soft factors” like
user-knowhow and user-commitment,
the basis of the data
the available support time frames for system maintenance
the effort for collecting, data preparation and -processing
are underestimatd or generally misjudged.
Less is more
Only take care of relevant data
Avoid “data graveyards”
Continuously enhance the optimization of all processes
Do not keep data for their own sake
Keep up internal communication and Know-How-transfer
Create dependence between data and processes, which guarantees the currentness and correctness of the data
Thoughts for a successful strategy:
GEFMA definition:
GEFMA made an important contribution to the definition of CAFM – Computer Aided Facility Management CAFM (terms and characteristic) through the document GEFMA400 . At he international market this definition is unfortunately still missing. The book by Prof. Dr. Michael May, HTW Berlin – “IT im Facility Management erfolgreich einsetzen” (only available in German) has a major share in providing an orientation “in the jungle”.
But you should be on high alert, when CAFM-providers try to publish their own definitions of CAFM in the internet and thus attempt to undermine the guideline concept of GEFMA. It could be that this is only a mediocre attempt to push their Google ranking.
The main definitions of CAFM Software in the GEFMA400 document is from our perspective:
” CAFM-Software is a software application which supports extensively all facility processes through the whole life cycle ….”
