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In the fast-paced world of building operations, Facilities Managers (FMs) play a central and multifaceted role. They are tasked with ensuring their buildings run efficiently, with minimal failure or waste, and must be able to quickly access information about what’s happening in the building at any given time.
FMs are always juggling a multitude of tasks. After health and safety, the top concern of FMs surveyed in CMM’s 2023 Benchmarking Report was improving productivity and workflow efficiencies. FMs grapple daily with coordinating and tracking dozens of work items, from equipment maintenance to contractor management. Without the right tools and an effective system in place, daily task management can quickly spiral out of control.
That’s where platforms like CIM’s PEAK come into play. Using a single platform to track and log all facility-related tasks—not just those that were triggered by alerts—fosters seamless collaboration, increases closure rates, improves knowledge transfer and enhances a building’s overall efficiency. Users have found PEAK effective for a wide range of uses, including: notes to self, equipment defects, BMS requests, scheduled repair reminders, and OHS hazards.
Of course, the beating heart of the platform is its Rules Engine, which contains thousands of algorithm-based rules that trigger alerts to notify of faults, anomalies or opportunities to optimise. However, PEAK’s functionality has expanded beyond this to now be leveraged as a holistic workflow solution, setting the stage for streamlined processes, higher efficiency, and optimised collaboration.
Facilitate better collaboration
Issues on-site often require input from multiple trades before they can be resolved. The traditional back-and-forth of emails, calls, and text messages can easily hinder progress and render accountability unclear. With every task captured in PEAK, the whole team can easily see where issues stand and who is currently responsible for them.
PEAK is more than an analytics software platform where BMS data meets a sophisticated library of rules and triggered alerts. It’s also become the ideal place to centralise task-based communication, creating a unified source of truth that FMs, contractors, and other operational team members can access. Real-time communication around specific tasks remains within the platform, ensuring that all digital records around an issue are consolidated in one place for clarified progress.
Improving communication also enhances contractor engagement, encouraging all stakeholders to participate actively in initiatives that progress the performance of a building. Rather than adding steps to the communication chain and delaying action, contractors can update issues in PEAK and assign outstanding tasks directly, making monthly catch-ups more structured and fruitful.
“It’s great having a complete digital history of everyone’s comments, screenshots, photos and documents related to a particular issue, so I can keep on top of everything in the one place and avoid too much back-and-forth on email and follow-ups.” - Andrew Carroll, Senior Facilities Manager, Colliers
Get more done, quicker
While an FM’s work may largely go unnoticed by a building user, it’s anything but behind the scenes. PEAK empowers FMs to assign issues swiftly and seamlessly, with or without an active alert. Contractors can investigate and resolve tasks promptly, keeping closure rates high and timelines short.
While contractors can sometimes spin their wheels, looking for tasks to action and finding nothing, PEAK ensures that everyone stays productive with a clear list of actions to tackle daily. Completing and closing out actions keeps everyone on-task and contributes to higher workplace satisfaction for all involved. Tenants benefit from efficient, well-maintained buildings, and operations teams finish each day knowing they’ve completed work that has added value to the building.
“When we are on-site, we go through the actions in PEAK and get them done. I wouldn’t get nearly as much done if PEAK wasn’t there. I normally have to go through and find all the issues myself, but the platform makes some really good pickups for me to prioritise.” - David Sandford, BMS Contractor
Promote efficient building management
The multifaceted role of an FM encompasses a wide range of tasks, from managing contractor activities to keeping a vigilant eye on building operations and everything in between. PEAK plays a vital role in helping buildings run efficiently while saving FMs the hassle of juggling multiple systems and platforms as part of their day-to-day workflow.
Underscoring PEAK’s effectiveness and ease of use is the wide range of users intentionally capturing all facility issues in PEAK, not just alerts. Tracking issues in the platform frees up time normally spent on emails, reports, and manual follow-ups, rendering regular touchpoints more effective. By streamlining the problem-resolution workflow, PEAK serves as a one-stop solution for more efficient building management.
“I hate writing service reports. It’s an hour of my day where I have to prove I’ve done something, otherwise I’m just the guy that sits on the computer up in the plant room. No one knows what I’m doing, so I have to write a report. But with the PEAK Platform, I can just put all of my actions and everything in there. That’s probably one of my favourite things about PEAK.” - David Sandford, BMS Contractor
Why use PEAK as a holistic workflow tool?
PEAK provides a host of additional benefits that make it an indispensable tool in an FM's arsenal:
- Reduce time to value: PEAK enables early benefits even before full integration, cutting down the time to realise value on new sites. We’ve seen numerous examples of actions created by FMs and assigned to contractors before automated alerts or even a BACER are fully integrated (the hardware device that gathers BMS data). Used this way, PEAK delivers value even before integration with the BMS and rules deployment.
- All things HVAC: Users can keep track of all HVAC-related tasks in one place rather than managing alerts in the platform and other tasks elsewhere. PEAK serves as a comprehensive digital HVAC asset register, centralising communications and providing a structured agenda for regular contractor visits.
- Full digital record: Contractors can manage their entire workflow within the platform, recording all comments, photos, and documents related to each issue and replacing tedious report creation and management.
- Make wins visible: It can be awkward to sound your own trumpet and share each win with the client, but PEAK makes it easy. Rather than painstakingly walking through manual reports and email chains, clients gain direct access to wins via the platform.
- Streamlined workflow: Stakeholders can effortlessly assign tasks within the platform. Once assigned, the whole team can seamlessly collaborate in real-time to quickly and efficiently resolve issues.
PEAK in action: real-life workflow examples
A typical non-alert workflow in PEAK looks something like this: An FM notices an issue during an inspection, or is alerted to an issue by colleagues or tenants. They use PEAK to document the issue, capturing photos and making notes within the platform. Each issue can then be assigned directly to a contractor for investigation and resolution, with corresponding contractor notes logged on the FM-created task.
FMs have found PEAK effective for a wide range of uses, including:
- Notes to self
- Equipment defects
- BMS requests
- Scheduled repairs
- Safety OHS issues
As a real-life example, an Operations Assistant at a busy retail centre used PEAK to track progress in fixing a leak. After discovering the leak in front of a service lift, which posed a major OHS slip hazard, she raised an action for the on-site tech, including plenty of photos to demonstrate the issue’s severity. Raising an action in PEAK meant that she had one less email to send, and progress could be tracked within the one platform. She could easily track its status through to completion, exchanging notes with the tech and leaving a digital trail behind her.
In another example, an FM created a simple task for a monthly filter check. They wrote: “Please check the filters on the food court retailer’s unit once a month and inform me of findings.” Rather than having to remember to ask after this task monthly, scheduling emails or other manual communication, the FM was able to leverage PEAK’s workflows to automate this monthly check-in.
Conclusion
The usefulness of PEAK ranges far beyond automated alerts. Used fully, it functions as a holistic workflow tool where FMs can create actions and track their resolution through the platform, improving collaboration, increasing closure rates, and contributing to more efficient building management.
Get started with PEAK as a comprehensive workflow tool. Request a callback from one of our team members for a demo today.
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