The Facility Management system is composed of mutually interconnected modules, each managing different type of information. At this page, you will find detailed information about each standard module available. To further support individual needs of each customer, a customized modules can be added to the system.
The standard set of modules include:
- Tenants
- Contacts (technical, administrative)
- Related Objects/Properties
- Contracts
- Documents (technical, documentation, guides)
- Maintenance (planning, records, resources)
- Defects
- Adjustments
- Consumption (energy, water, ...)
- Notes
- Employees
- Lost and Found
- Templates (dynamic user-defined data objects)
- Multilinguality
Properties and Objects (equipment) Evidence
Properties are the basic units forming the Facility Management system. A property or “an object” is a general item, we want to track information about. This can be a construction object, piece of equipment or similar.
Typical examples of properties are: blocks of flats, houses, apartments or internal equipments of the building, such as furnace or air conditioning unit. Each property (object) has its own code, name and location. Properties can be also related among themselves using the different relation types, such as “is part of”, “neighbors with”, “belongs to”, etc. The relation types may be user-defined.
To make the evidence easier, faster, complete and well-aranged, property “templates” can be defined for groups of similar objects. These define information fields of user-defined data type common for certain type of object. (e.g. area in m2 for apartments or power in kW for a backup electricity generator). See “Templates” for details.
Owners
Each property may be owned by an arbitrary number of owners. Owner can be a private person or company. System keeps personal information for owners and enables to use common search functions to find required information.
System also tracks the history of owners as they are changing. Furthermore, it may be used for capturing and archiving all communication between owners and the system administrators.
Tenants
The system includes list of all tenants of registered properties and their linking to them. One property can have more tenants. Tenant is a private person or a company (subject). Emailing module is included to the system and possible to use for sending email to tenants.
Tenants may also access certain information included in register and do designed actions, such as report equipment failures or check the property maintenance plans.
Contacts (technical, administrative)
Contacts include persons or companies related to a property. These may be service companies, contractors, maintainers or any other subjects, that do not belong to owners, tenants or employees.
The contact information include all common fields like phone, email, cell phone or VAT number for company. Contacts can be categorized into a predefined or user-defined types (e.g. repairmans, cleaning services, ...).
Related Objects/Properties
Related properties module enables to define relationship between any two properties/objects defined in the system. Common example of use could be a garage that is related to a house, an apartment or office that is a part of residental or commercial building or some type of machinery, such as air-conditioning equipment installed in the basement of the building.
The types of relationship can be user-defined and the number of relations is not limited in any way.
Use of relationships make easier the navigation within the system as well as storing much greater detail of information of desired. In connection with templates, this is a unique and very powerfull information management tool.
Contracts
The contract module tracks information about signed contracts and/or legal issues related to a property. These may include variety of maintenance contracts, supplier contacts, security contracts, etc. The system is capable of watching over signed dates and in advance warn the administrator when any contract is subject to revision or renewal. System also tracs information about the financial volume of signed contracts.
The contract module is futher linked to documents module, so the electronic copies of the agreements or other legal or technical documents (e.g. maintenance instructions or documentation) can be assigned to specific contracts and thus easily make accessible to all designed personell.
Similarily to other modules, contracts can be sorted according to user-definable types.
Documents (technical, documentation, guides)
Document related to a property/object can be any type of file. This may be a text document (Word, PDF), image, CAD drawing or other. Document module is designed to enable keep all relevant and complete information about properties, including technical documentation, evacuation plans, photos, usage manuals, instructions, policies, security rules, etc.
User can insert a document into to the system either by uploading it from a file from local disk or by editng in using a simple integrated WYSIWYG editor. To help find desired documents, and advanced filter system is implemented. Once again, all documents can be assigned and sorted by into user-defined types.
Maintenance (planning, records, resources)
The maintenance module is one of the key stones of the system. It allows to easily plan, track and records all the needed maintenance tasks related to a property or its equipment, both planned and unexpected. The system also keeps track (optionally) on resources used for the maintenance (people word, material, equipment usage).
The maintenance may include cleaning, regular fixes and checks, small repairs or major upgrades and modernization.
As regards planned maintenace, there is available a sophisticated calendar and scheduler tool to clearly plan needed maintenance actions. These can be planned either for specific dates in advance or automatically in recurring cycles. Every maintenance event can be assigned to a specific person as a task.
Each employee then can see maintenance task assigned to him/her for given period and make records about its progress and resources used. Managers can then use usefull overview to monitor if all task are being done on time and properly. Resource usage overview can then be used to calculate the maintenance costs and as a background information for invoicing to the clients.
The are overviews available for property / according time period / for employees and for managers.
The maintenance module can be also integrated with SMS (Short Message System) in a mobile phone network to be able to send and receive the information about the tasks progress from the site. This can help optimize and speed up all the processes.
This module is also integrated with the following defects module, that enables tenants or users to report unexpected faults and follow the progress of fixing it.
Defects
Defects is a module, that can be used by tenants, staff or customers to report problems connected with a property they use, own or take care of. Once the defect report is inserted into system, its status and fixing progress can be monitored. The administrators thus get an overview of currently existing problems related to managed properties and tenants/owners can easily find out if their problem is already reported or not.
Interconnection with maintenance module allows to plan suitable time for fixing it. A person reporting the problem (e.g. tenant) has also possibility to suggest a proposed time when the problem shall be fixed (e.g. when he will be at home).
The defects may also have defined severity status and can be fixed according to its priority. After fixing the problem the status is changed, and similarily to maintenance tasks, the resources used to fix the problem may be recorded.
Adjustments
This module helps to keep track about adjustments done and planned to a managed property. Adjustment can be, for instance, replacement of pipes, roof reconstruction, etc. Each record may contain information about expected price, type of adjustment, delivery date and guarantee period.
Cooperation with other modules (such as documents) enables to archive necessary information, such as documentation, constructions plans or other information related to an adjustment.
Consumption (energy, water, ...)
Consumption module is used to track information about property resources usage. These resources will usually include water, electricity, gas or similar sources. The goal is to help to monitor these, estimate consumption in following period and optimize the running costs.
The consumption is tracked using a consumption meters. The system enables to enter as many meter as much consumptions gauges can be found withing property (e.g. per apartment). Then the current status on each meter can be simply recorded and entered into the system, which then automatically summarizes and calculates the real consumption for a selected period.
The results are shown as summarized statistics as well as graphically using graphs.
The consumption data collection may be further made easier and more automated by implementing possibility of loading data from a special electronical reading devices that the staff may be using in terrain to collect data from the gauges. Also interconnection with external system (such as electricity company may be considered).
Notes
Notes are any general information that can be assigned to each object. These may be used for different types of purposes such as recording TODOs, handing over temporary information when system is managed by multiple operators and so on. A note consists of title, description and type. The note types can be user-defined.
Employees/Staff
Employee/Staff management keeps the information about workers who are in charge of the managed properties and are allowed to work with the information system. Every person can be assigned a specific role, such as information manager, maintenance worker, consumption tracker, property manager, system administator, ...
To simplify management in large organizations, employees can be also assigned to user-definable groups.
Every staff member will have the unique name and account in the system. That enables assign maintenance or other tasks, to a particular staff member and continuously track progress of his job. After logging into the system, each employee can see clearly see his/her "own tasks" and additional information according to his/her competences.
Also, every important modification made to the data in the system is recorded with the name of the person doing the change, so most of the modifications can be tracked back.
The basic option of the system also includes possibility to for each employee personal data, photo and preferred language of the system.
Lost and Found
Lost and Found module helps to manage tracing of items lost or found within the monitored objects. This may be especially used in public or highly visited places as well as properties, where tenants change often, such as hotels, cottages, museums, etc.
These items found or lost can be tracked since their finding/lost to return to original owner. Descriptive information include e.g.: found/lost by, date, property where the item was lost/found, item description, when, to whom and how the lost item was returned to, etc.
Templates (dynamic user-defined data objects)
System of templates enables to define dynamic objects and defines sets of characteristics (information fields) common for object of same or similar type. An example could be a template called "apartment", which define information fields such as "area" (in m2), "number of rooms" (integer), "type of heating system" (text or list of values), etc.
The purpose of this is to save time when defining complex data structures that the Facility management system can keep information about and at the same time not to limit users in means of what information they can store. Thanks to this system the system can be very flexible in means of the "depth" of information that may be stored. You can define a "residental house" as a complex object, but you can also define separate its subobjects, such as "apartment", "storeage room", etc. If these need to be further defined, an apartment can consist of "bathroom", "kitchen", "equiment", ... . There are virtually no limits in the data structure that will be used and this can be completely adjusted to the client needs.
One template can also consist of other templates as sub-templates. This approach enables to define hierarchy structure of templates, where one particular sub-template can be reused in the several different main templates (e.g. you can define a template "bathroom" that can be used in object of type "house" or "apartment").
Multilinguality
The construction register system has been designed as a tool with multi-language interface. This implies each user can choose his preferred language, which will be used by the system after logging in.
