Q. How do I begin to automate or eliminate tasks that will make our property or facility management operations more efficient?

A. The most effective way to understand the task is to investigate. Or as I fondly think of this: investigate to automate or eliminate! The only way I have found to reduce our detail-laden industry is to follow each task like a detective and ask tons of questions. Hence the term, investigate!

In my past positions I would literally walk around and ask people what they were doing and why? I would also ask myself the same question about my own processes and procedures constantly. It was important for me to analyze what I was doing and reflect on how often that task would benefit our operation or company.

My favorite example is filing of anything made of paper. When I polled the staff on what task was the most hated, it was a unanimous vote of – FILING PAPER! Everyone hated it and felt it was wasteful. We began to analyze what we were filing and how we were filing it. Once we learned of the task, we began to measure the frequency of our need to access that paper we filed and how we accessed it: month, alphabetical, property name, client name, chronological, etc.

With a simple task such as filing, and changing your current ways, you will notice so much efficiency unfolding. You must analyze each task with the goal of either elimination or inclusion with another task to make it work smart for you! It may seem tedious, but property and facility management operations are so detail oriented that it really does require an in-depth analysis or investigation of what and why things are being done. Use this simple and short checklist. Post it around the office. Put it in your employee newsletter. Make this your motto – - Investigate to automate or eliminate!

• Think digital. Be sure all of your data and documents are on your server system.
• Follow the reports. Where are they being stored?
• Start a future cut-off date today. In other words, effective 2011, we will no longer ________________________.
• Whatever it is you are doing in 2010, try to stop doing it in 2011. Start a new method with a new year. It makes so much sense because it is easy to remember and document. For instance, if you print reports and file the reports in paper form. Stop all reports as of December 2010. Starting in January 2011, they will be in .pdf (portable document format) and filed in a certain folder on your server.
• Insure all MISSION CRITICAL folders on your server are backed up with a strict method in place. Back-ups need a back-up as well.
• What is inside all of those filing cabinets and how often are they retrieved?
• Back away from the copy machine.
• Stop using the fax machine and start using the scanner or only use the fax machine to scan it.
• How is it being filed/sorted? Is it by property or facility? How you file can make a difference in time and efficiency. By year, month, etc.
• Does everything need a file? Do you really need to file it at all? Keep digging and determining what you really need as compared to what it costs you to perform that task.

We have created a poll at trendycharts called ‘Investigate to Automate or Eliminate’ Are You Thinking Property and Facility Management Efficiency? We would love to see the trend in our industry today and how it evolves. What type of efficiency-minded thinker are you? Will this article change your mind about how you do think? Take the poll and let’s see how our industry is thinking today and into the future.

Remember:
Investigate to Automate or Eliminate.

Value.

Ask me anything about technology or efficiency or automation or websites or whatever. If I do not know, I can find out.

Before that however, you have to have the basics. Today, you must be Informed and Equipped so you really do bring Value to your Properties, Facilities, Companies, Organizations. DO NOT bury your head in the sand. Spend this downtime getting really, really Valuable.

Every PM/FM professional must have and/or at least understand the below and its potential, both personally and professionally. How many of the below items can you articulate to an employer, employee, student, client, etc.?:

Anti Virus Software
Anti Malware
Anti Spyware
Computer Cleaning/Maintenance Tools and why
Automatic Microsoft Updates and why (sorry Apple, this is for the masses)
External Hard Drive + Automatic Back up + Additional Back up
FREE Online photo album
FREE Online document sharing
FREE Online calendar
FREE email account or two
The Twitter concept is not a stupid gimmick
Online PR Tools
FREE VoIP phone number and voicemail
FREE conference calling service
Online fax service
Why Notepad and html is so powerful
ISP = Utility
FREE Social Media account or two
Domain name
A website to call your own and a basic understanding of it
FREE tools for everything imaginable are everywhere

If any of this is of any interest to anybody, I am happy to go on and on and on with information. I do not want to freak you out or scare you, just make you and your projects better equipped.

I cannot imagine managing a property without the above under any condition. I need the above to function and manage my property as efficiently as possible.

Do others agree or am I just a freak here? If anyone wants to help me, jump in. If you think I am off base, just say so.

Thanks,
Linda@ManagerLabs.com

Well the property and facility management industry is inundated with acronyms: PM, FM, ROI, NOI, MLS, IREM, CCIM, BOMA, TI, LO, LOI, you get the drift. But now the industry is being exposed to terminology and acronyms that the tech world and many others, hopes will change the industry forever. The term is SaaS, or Software As A Service. In other words, an automation that is online and can be called a tool or portal. With SaaS, everyone is delivered the same software via a browser that you use for FREE or with a subscription, just like any other subscription service.

The point of SaaS is to actually provide service that enables you to automate or streamline the current process or method you are using today in your offices and improve service delivery and/or reduce your labor and overhead. For example, we all have heard of Lock Box, Multiple Listing Services (MLS), and Online Banking. Now the next generation of online technology has started with a multitude of products and tools that are above and beyond those traditional shared software, now online, products. The products vary from website portals that deliver template formats for property websites to payment processing and bill paying. Everything consumers have been enjoying at home for years! In addition, all of the Cloud products, such as document storage, email and online productivity applications are basically SaaS services as well. With the Property Management industry fraught with overhead and a multitude of remote sites, SaaS and Cloud should be on any companies radar as an alternative.

It is very exciting to find blogs, such as Software Advice where you can read about the Property and Facility Management industry and its migration to this evolution by our industry with technology. It is about time we get our act together and reduce our redundancy, provide 24/7/365 service to our customers, create standards, eliminate the pain of training, pool our resources, create economies of scale, and improve our accuracy. The author of the blog, Chris Thorman is a member of several groups I belong to on LinkedIn and I offered to share his basic and easy to understand article at his Software Advice blog for software advice to the Property Management Industry.

Consider joining our family of LinkedIn groups:

PFMI (Property and Facility Management Innovators)

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=1858850

–Vendor Bidding Lab (beta) subgroup of PFMI

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2238793

–PFMC(Property Facility Management Companies) subgroup of PFMI

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2644670

Rooftop Gardening

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=143300

Certified Property Managers (CPM Group)
Need to be listed in IREM Membership Roster.

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=138868

Join me at Maven Research too: https://www.mavenresearch.com/join/4G4Y4QmB