Building Blocks

Building Blocks greatly simplifies the management and oversight of assets by organizing a centralized, facility-related database into manageable and cohesive information and reports. With minimal time and effort, managers and systems administrators can direct large, multi-facility sites, issue work orders, prioritize and schedule preventative maintenance, inspect the condition of assets and make educated decisions for the replacement of large capital expenditures. Integrated Building Blocks components supply the knowledge needed to support operational decision such as:

• Will the budget fund the necessary capital improvements?
• What is the required preventive maintenance schedule for my equipment?
• What are my operational, life, health and safety priorities?
• What resources are most cost effective?
• Should insurance coverage be updated?
• What facilities need attention first?

Building Blocks integrates business operations and ongoing maintenance with information technology to provide users with detailed analysis capabilities to support effective decision-making. The improved levels of accountability, productivity and efficiencies will provide managers with the knowledge to:

• Uniquely identify and solve operational problems
• Effectively plan and budget for operational expenses and capital expenditures
• Tie expenses to their true source
• Understand total life-cycle costs of assets, equipment and facilities

Building Blocks addresses many areas, including:

• Asset Management – Manage a comprehensive and detailed inventory of your assets.
• Preventative Maintenance – Define and schedule preventative maintenance tasks.
• Work Order Management – Automate work orders to streamline work planning and tracking of costs.
• Inventory – Manage inventories to support repairs, preventative maintenance and work order needs.
• Capital Planning – Utilize asset condition, replacement and maintenance data to plan for capital renewal.
• Service Requests – Create, send and check status on requests for services, goods and supplies.
• Condition Assessments – Assess the condition of your assets to prioritize life/safety issues and reduce liability.
• Resource Management – Qualify and manage work personnel to optimize scheduling efficiency.
• Analysis and Reporting – Develop your own custom reports or chose from our library of predefined reports

The essential components of any effective facility operations best practice model are comprehensive knowledge about the assets supported by effective processes and analysis tools. Building Blocks is structured to manage these three major elements: Assets, for the core information database; Operations, to support work flow and processes and Analysis, for decision support.

Assets - “Assets” stores comprehensive and detailed information about facilities, building components, equipment and assets. Organizations identify the facility components and assets that are important to their ongoing effective operation. Information tracked about these elements in conjunction with built-in analysis and reporting then become the basis for good, sound facility decisions. The following list represents a small sampling of the challenges that “Assets“ can address:

• What assets are under management? Where are they located? What is their total value?
• What is the true total cost of ownership for this asset? What is the replacement cost?
• When do they go out of service? What assets are under warranty?
• What is the square feet of each building/room/dept.?

A broad range of data fields allows an organization to capture the most critical information. Furthermore, asset information, cost, effective life, replacement year, warranty and lease information provides the foundation for accurate capital renewal and budgeting. Pictures and graphic images provide visual details.

Building Blocks Facilities benefits organizations in many ways:

• Provides real-time access to complete and accurate property and asset information
• Increases productivity and improves performance
• Reduces budget discrepancies
• Supports accurate alignment between insurance premiums and facility and asset inventory
• Provides immediate access to capital planning requirements

*Operations * - The ”Operations“ center of Building Blocks provides the core process functions to ensure optimal asset management results. It provides tools for developing and tracking bid proposals and work orders as well as vendor and staff resources. With proactive planning, organizations can achieve time and cost savings by managing multiple work orders, the bid process, and vendor and staff resources in an organized, efficient process. Using the Preventative Maintenance functions, organizations can reduce reactive costly crisis repairs. A standard accreditation procedure ensures that vendors and staff are qualified to perform the work. Bids are automatically populated to ensure that vendors quote on current job specifications. A condition assessment process provides a formal approach to ongoing facility inspections. Using predefined standard ratings, an organization can implement a system of periodic assessments to identify and prioritize deteriorating conditions and take corrective action before expensive crisis repairs become necessary. Accurate facility inspection information further supports the capital improvement planning process by relying not only on the expected life of the asset, but real and current conditions.

Building Blocks Operations benefits organizations in many ways:

• Automates time critical preventive maintenance and corrective repair process
• Lowers maintenance costs with effective use of internal vs. external resources
• Reduces liability by qualifying and monitoring critical staff and vendor information
• Tracks where time and money are spent
• Justifies life/health/safety priorities
• Reduces liability and risk
• Reduces capital renewal costs

Analysis- Building Blocks provides a variety of system-generated standard reports as well as a custom reporting feature. The reports provide an excellent source of comprehensive information that can aid managers and administrators in the decision-making process for strategic planning, capital improvement expenditures, inventory management, etc. The Report Writer, Crystal Reports Professional, also allows the user to define their own reports to meet their own specific needs. Data within the system can also be directly exported to many other desktop applications, such as accounting systems and also to HTML for publishing on a website.

Building Blocks creates an intelligent central source of information that provides the foundation for sound facility decisions. It:

• Improves the flow of knowledge throughout an organization to meet informational needs at all levels
• Facilitates the achievement of consistent, reliable results through a formalized facility management process
• Reduces liability and enhances accountability
• Provides data analysis for optimal facility-related decision making