subject: The Importance of Facilities Management [print this page] The Importance of Facilities Management The Importance of Facilities Management
If you are not sure why you need business intelligence for facilities management you may want to review exactly how you are running your facilities. Let's use the example of a fast food restaurant. You own twenty of them and business is not doing so wonderfully right now. You can blame it on the economy, but you still have to do something about it, so you look at your options like closing the stores and trying to sell them, lowering hours, or cutting labor. These are the three main choices people have when their business is struggling, but in this case you would be making a huge mistake. Business intelligence is having the data you need to make the right choices. This data is not just a number at the end of each month that shows if you made a profit or took a loss, it shows everything, down to the very last detail. It breaks the restaurants up into individuals, showing the production at certain times of the day, expenses, and other important information. With this data you could find out that half of your restaurants are actually making a respectable profit. The problem is the other ten are not, but because of the detailed data you know why. Five of the restaurants that are hurting are not making enough money early in the morning and the other five struggle at night. Well that means all you have to do is put less money into labor during the struggling hours, or even have the restaurants closed the hours they struggle the most.
As you can see, because you had detailed data about your facilities you were able to make the proper management decisions that helped you the most. Blanket data that just gives you a few numbers each month will hurt you in the long run. Again using the example of the twenty restaurants from above, if you were to use any of the three main choices for all of the restaurants you would have severely cut into your profits. That is bad facilities management and it is all because you did not have the information you needed to make the right choice. When managing several places you need to have all the information you can possibly have, however, if that data is not organized it can take too much time for you to process all of it. You need efficient, organized data that will allow you to make the best decisions for your company.
