Managing properties across commercial, manufacturing, or residential is often a reactive process. This means – you respond to issues, downtimes, or any mismanagement when the problem becomes visible enough to take action on. Such practices increase the cost of maintenance and may even lead to irreparable damage. To enable a proactive approach, facility owners should opt for preventive maintenance strategies. To execute this, one has to adopt property management software which digitizes preventive maintenance, work order management, and inventory control – read more to learn how.
What is property management software?
Property management software helps automate and streamline facility management operations. This includes tasks across automating contract lifecycle management, handling issue resolution, tracking assets, managing work orders, and much more.
For example, property management software provides a centralized dashboard to understand the status of your equipment, materials, supplies, and workers. This provides the necessary visibility on the facility where you can make decisions, fix issues, or execute work orders remotely.
6 Key features of property management software include:
- Create, assign, and track work orders
- Centralized dashboard to track key metrics, urgent alerts, payments, worker availability, etc.
- Handle administrative tasks for field service technicians like digital timesheets, raising time off requests, registering anomaly behavior, etc.
- Documentation access to refer to manuals, share files, create checklists, and edit documents as required in real time.
- Perform accounting and track financial transactions. The software can also help in financial projections and share reports on required services, expenses, and revenues.
- Create, negotiate, edit, and execute contracts throughout its lifecycle. Includes digital signatures, invoice creation, and payments.
3 key trends in property management via digital transformation
Apart from implementing preventive maintenance for facility management, here are three key property management challenges that digitization helps overcome:
Automation of manual processes that often lead to human errors
Traditional property management workflows involve frequent paperwork, back-and-forth communication between workers and managers, or data entry tasks. Such workflows can be easily automated – but not doing so results in miscommunication and time consumption in repetitive tasks.
Property management software automates many repetitive tasks like the creation of contracts, handling digital payments, collecting recurring rent, automatically creating reports for equipment, and alerting in case of downtimes, etc. This reduces administrative workload such that your assigned field service technicians can focus on maintaining the facility by making quicker decisions to resolve issues. Due to reduced errors and faster response times, your facility experiences reduced rework and fewer losses due to negligence.
Real-time communication and data sharing
For handling emergencies or downtimes, your assigned field service technicians need to communicate with supervisors and managers on time. Digitization of the facility using mobile app-based property management tools provides real-time communication methods like messaging, file sharing of images, making video calls, notifications, and more. This reduces the time taken to convey emergencies, share real-time updates on maintenance activities, or submit special requests with field service teams.
Property management software with integration capabilities helps share data with other software. For example, if you have historical data about certain equipment and wish to better analyze its performance, the software will help instantly transfer tracked data. If you used manual paperwork to track equipment health – that would mean lots of data entry tasks and exposure to errors.
Location intelligence and asset tracking
Property management software which includes GPS access helps track field service worker movements and assets. Implementing features such as geo-fencing – which means tracking any movement in and out of the facility area helps nab any theft attempts or unproductive work by workers. It makes it possible to understand the time spent by workers productively on the site so they can get compensated accordingly.
Asset tracking features help track equipment, material, or other supply movements outside the facility. You can perform route optimization to save time and fuel costs in the transportation of assets.
Get started with the digital transformation of your facility for better operational efficiency
Zuper provides advanced field service management solutions that your facility can use to automate its maintenance operations. Our AI and GPS-enabled features help make intelligent decisions, gain real-time visibility to operations, and increase uptime – book a demo today to know more.
