Facility documentation software for simpler audit readiness

The Value of Secure, Centralized Building Documentation

Facility managers face the impossible task of doing more with less. Balancing the needs of facility occupants with constrained budgets and limited staff, all while ensuring compliance, can feel like an overwhelming challenge. By organizing and centralizing building documentation through technology, facility teams can manage these tasks more effectively and reduce the workload on staff. That’s our expertise. We create solutions that help customers organize, access, and secure all information related to the built environment, enabling facility teams to work more efficiently, complete projects, capitalize on new opportunities, and protect their most valuable assets. In this guide, we’ll cover various strategies to achieve these goals.

Transforming Response Times with Efficient Building Documentation Access

Facility emergencies rarely happen at convenient times. As a Facility Manager, you may be called to address issues like water leaks or fire alarms triggered by a sprinkler failure. These situations demand immediate attention. With a mapping interface and comprehensive building data, our Facility Emergencies app helps users know where and when to act. With a mobile-first solution, you'll have relevant information at your fingertips, whether you're in the boiler room, on the rooftop, or elsewhere.

Facilities personnel become a ‘knowledge worker’ by having the latest documentation at their fingertips on a mobile device. They can access schematics, spec sheets, project information, CAP Ex status, photos of equipment, locations and room details to avoid errors and streamline maintenance, upgrade or inspection activities. Our emergency information solution means your workforce will always have the information they need in an emergency, such as evacuation procedures or locations of hazardous materials – business as usual. Information that could be lifesaving or costly to neglect is instantly available to enhance occupant safety and compliance.

Even in straightforward settings, ARC Facilities bring many benefits. But in busy locations such as Schools, Hospitals, and Sports venues, where many people need quick and easy access to up-to-date information, ARC Facilities really come into their own. By helping you quickly and easily transform, organize, and update paper documents into a fully searchable digital format, ARC Facilities enables you to share information with colleagues anywhere, anytime. And by relieving your staff of time-consuming, mundane administrative tasks, ARC Facilities ensures that your employees can focus on far more important issues – like providing first-class service to patients, students, members, or fans.

Leveraging Digital Solutions for Lifecycle Management and Compliance

Strategic planning for facilities documentation is essential for creating a beneficial resource. The strategic value is realized over the entire life cycle of a facility by having the plans for capital, renovation, or expansion projects readily available, organized, and up-to-date. Someone on the maintenance staff can immediately assist with a problem, or the project manager can use the most current plans for a major renovation.

With our building plans solution, we have full control and visibility of all architectural and engineering content, ensuring continuity between construction, maintenance, and facility administration teams – all working towards maximizing the facilities’ long-term value. By ensuring that all legacy plans are efficiently digitized and new projects are added as they progress through development, turnover, and maintenance, we avoid information silos and ensure smooth project handoffs with a single source of truth.

Managing the Full Lifecycle of a Facility

Managing the full lifecycle of a facility involves a number of processes, but perhaps none is as critical as the process of maintaining and ensuring compliance. This can be a daunting task, especially when codes, regulations, and inspection processes are constantly evolving. Bad actors and oversight can easily create scenarios in which facility operators and managers are prosecuted, fined, or become liable for accidents when documentation is incomplete or inaccessible.

Our document management solutions for compliance prevent these types of problems by streamlining processes and making it easy to update and manage information in order to keep pace with ever-changing regulations and inspection requirements. Healthcare clients store all documentation in dynamic document libraries linked to specific pieces of equipment or individual inspections, making it easy to pass audits. Similarly, schools, government agencies, and large commercial operators benefit from the same practices that allow our healthcare clients to be audit-ready at a moment’s notice while ensuring that critical building information and data are properly archived and readily accessible as needed for future reports.

Adopting Best Practices to Streamline Building Documentation Management

We’ll need more than world-class technology to make the shift to digital documentation – we’ll need best practices to help enable our workforce to stay organized, focused, and empowered to do their best work. Start by bringing all documentation up to scratch. Work out what’s missing, obsolete, or duplicated and address the issues as soon as possible. Digitize the entire set of documentation, including all plans and Operation & Maintenance manuals, to be used throughout the building’s lifecycle.

Additionally, maximize the searchability of your content by organizationally arranging your documentation through the use of appropriate file names and a highly organized folder structure. Many of our solutions come with tags, categories, and metadata that can be pre-populated on the creation of content, making it easier and quicker for all users to find and update relevant material wherever it is stored. Users can also be granted permissions to allow access to certain documentation based on role and job function, ensuring sensitive or critical information is protected from unwanted eyes.

Building a Resilient and Future-Ready Facilities Program

With increasingly intelligent and dynamic buildings, facility management strategies must evolve accordingly. The future of building documentation is mobile, web-based, connected, and always accessible by any member of the building’s operational team. The use of high-quality digital documentation solutions delivers many advantages, including flexibility in how information is managed, enabling facility teams to be as agile and resilient as required.

With the right digital documentation content in place, facility staff have unparalleled access to precise and up-to-date information. This leads to improved efficiency, streamlined maintenance, and decision-making based on real-time data. Imagine how your team would operate if ANY employee could quickly access emergency contacts, look up equipment manuals, or locate shutoff valves from their smartphone or tablet during walkdowns, on calls, or while conducting work orders.

Conclusion

This is what our O&M documentation platform can do for you and your customers across industries. With recent updates and enhancements, we continue to learn from our customers and trends within the facility management processes, adapting our platform to meet the shifting expectations of labor, growth, and regulatory pressures. Join us in meeting tomorrow’s challenges today with a focus on the future.

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