This is the 21st century. And everyone knows that the paper-bound processes are no longer necessary.
However, the same is not true for the facilities management industry.
There are still many organizations that depend on papers to complete their daily facility operations.
Paper-based processes are cumbersome, are hard to maintain, and lead to unnecessary wastage of time, money, and resources.
Given the pace with which we are progressing, organizations cannot afford to do business in the traditional ways.
Hence, I have come up with this article wherein I will talk about digital checklists and their critical role in facilities management.
As always, let’s start with some definitions.
Digital Checklist Equals to Incredible Resource
A checklist is an incredible resource in every workplace, and facility management is no exception. A comprehensive checklist may assist employees – both experienced and new – in staying on top of workplace standards, processes, and growth.
Checklists are used in many facilities for quality assurance, pre-production runs, post-production runs, training progression, cleaning, lubricating, and other purposes.
What’s the Ultimate Goal of Digital Checklists?
Here’s what a digital checklist helps to achieve in an organization.
Ensure that the Business Run Smoothly
Facility managers must conduct daily inspections to ensure that the premises are working as they should. This includes basic activities like turning on and off lights in specified locations, distributing mail, and restocking vending machines.
Using digital checklists assists them in remembering what they need to accomplish and keeping track of the activities that have been done.
Security
Protecting a building and keeping the company premises safe may be made easier by using digital checklists that offer access to a digital record of when inspections have been performed, who performed the inspection, and where.
You can operate your firm efficiently and achieve your business goals by implementing suitable workplace security solutions.
Safety
Failure to manage safety may result in unhealthy circumstances that cause personnel to become ill, injury, loss of the company, prosecution, and insurance claims.
Digital checklists aid in the development of a complete health and safety program in the workplace.
Identifying possible risks and creating processes to deal with them will protect the safety of your employees and demonstrate your commitment to implementing a safety culture in your company.
Cleaning and Hygiene
A critical aspect of building management is ensuring that all-important elements of a structure are fully examined and cleaned.
Digital checklists offer a timestamped record of when inspections were performed and may be used to help employees through the process of determining what needs to be cleaned and how.
4 Major Benefits of Digital Checklists
While I have covered the goals of Digital Checklists, let’s see what else they bring to the table.
1. Process/Maintenance Scheduling
Do you have a machine that has to be lubed once a day? Is it completed? Managers may tailor checklists to their specific schedules by employing our recurring checklists.
The answer is simple; you can specify a maximum number of occurrences or an end date for the checklist.
2. Real-time Alerts and Notifications
With the digital checklist, send/receive an alert to any particular manager or position you choose to notify them of the impending deadline.
Field workers have the option of getting in-app notifications, browser notifications, emails, or text messages.
3. Digital Signature for Accountability
Digital Checklists may ask the person doing the checklist to sign off on the checklist after it has been finished.
This document captures their signature as well as the date and time of completion, so there is no question about when it occurred.
4. Flexible and Better Customizability
Since digital checklists are designed to accommodate any type of flow, your checklists are only limited by your imagination.
Quality assurance, inspections, field audit checklist, safety inspections, and other common checklists are examples.
The information given in a checklist can be utilized to run reports against safety information, training logs, or maintenance records when using a digital checklist system.
5 High-Level Benefits of Using Digital Checklist Over Paper
With goals and features aside, let’s have a look at the topmost benefits of Digital Checklists.
1. Paper is Expensive
In an ever-changing digital environment, using paper procedures means losing productivity, money, and genuine insight into your facilities.
When it comes to tracking critical information at a facility, paper just isn’t a long-term solution. While a single sheet of paper may not be the most costly item you’ve considered this week, it soon adds up.
2. Paper Hampers Productivity
Paper-based methods add to the clutter and complexity, not to mention that handwriting is not uniformly readable.
Every time one employee spends time attempting to decipher the handwriting of another employee, hunting that person down, or just looking for the document in the first place, time is lost.
3. No Accountability
Paper-based processes limit managers’ and workers’ capacity to hold each other accountable. Checklists may be modified on the fly, boxes can be quickly checked when an inspector arrives, and signatures and dates can be faked.
It is difficult for managers and staff to have genuine transparency or accountability with a paper list, which leads to mistrust of the information supplied.
Going digital means improving efficiency, reducing complexity and clutter, and gaining a deeper understanding of your facilities.
4. Clear, Transparent Information
When you don’t use paper, you don’t have to fudge the numbers, look for the proper binder, or decipher chicken scratch handwriting.
You can see when a checklist was finished, who did it and signed off on it, and when it was completed. You may even see when a recurrent checklist is skipped.
5. Advanced Analytics
Paper offers no more insight into data. When you go digital, you may have access to additional information about your facility by running reports on how frequently checklists are completed, who is skipping them, and so on.
When utilizing a paper system, you simply cannot obtain such information without much study and patience.
Axonator as the #1 Digital Checklist Platform
I’m sure I have cleared how important digital checklists are in facility management.
For Facilities managers, it entails the responsibilities of day-to-day maintenance, contingency planning improvements, identifying potential issues before they occur, and implementing problem-solving solutions as fast as feasible.
At the same time, digital checklists also offer direction and ensure that all jobs are performed on time and to the appropriate standards.
By moving to digital checklists, organizations and managers alike take more control and render the operations more efficient.
That’s why Axonator offers the most advanced digital checklist for facility management. With a mobile-first approach and the ultimate of customizability, the Axonator no-code platform comes as a silver bullet for today’s facility managers.
Here’s you can check out the checklists here.
