In the evolving landscape of facilities management, some more traditional systems like CMMS and IWMS are struggling to keep up with current needs. These legacy systems, while foundational, often come with complex interfaces and feature creep that make it very challenging to report on cleaning and maintenance tasks. Consequently, managers and most importantly, your field personnel use impacting the quality of data you capture and limiting communication that can help improve efficiency.

This blog post will take a look at common issue areas for these legacy systems from mobile usability to managing every day tasks like cleaning to measuring and improving service levels. In addition, we’ll share how to supplement and supercharge your use of these systems with complimentary mobile-first solutions that focus on the overall user and occupant experience.

Mobile Usability Is Often Lacking

Legacy CMMS/IWMS systems often have limited functionality that fails to meet today’s needs of facilities management. Complicated user interfaces can be cumbersome, slowing down users and leading to difficulties. This often is seen the most in the lack of or quality of their mobile offerings.

Mobile interfaces are critical for field staff communications and for the recording of work order progress and completion. The following limitations are often seen in CMMS offerings:

Limited Real-Time Data Capabilities

Your data is only as good as the data entered by your facilities team members. While many CMMS have mobile offerings, many fall short of the needs of field staff, who often have to really on desktop versions to record work. This leads to lagging data and hurts data capture.

Incomplete Data with no Images and Location

With more modern mobile work order solutions, indoor location and imagery of the issue and completion are common. This provides a richer data set that enables better planning and execution for teams that drive efficiency. Many CMMS solutions do not support precise location and imagery data as part of their solution.

Challenges with Scalability

As you provide your staff with mobile solutions to cross the digital divide, it's important to understand the IT and scalability landscape. Features like SSO are typically needed for widespread adoption of mobile applications.

As the demand on quality performance increases, it’s crucial that you enable your teams with mobile-first solutions that they can use to be more productive and improve communication wherever they are on site.

Limited Ability to Track Every Day Tasks like Cleaning

One of the largest costs in our facilities budgets is the everyday cleaning that is happening in our space. A clean space is also the most definable characteristic of a well-maintained building and space from an occupant perspective.

With the rise of digital solutions to track every day cleaning efforts, organizations are seeing that the CMMS is ill-equipped to measure and track these efforts. Purpose built cleaning software offers the ability augment the following gaps when it comes to cleaning operations:

Limited Real-Time Reporting

CMMS were built to track and measure reactive maintenance work or work orders. While this can work for these types of requests, for every day requests like cleaning of an office space or classroom are too frequent to be tracked effectively in these systems. Cleaning software can be used to track every cleaning by location across your building portfolio in concert with your CMMS.

​​Quality Reporting

Along with everyday tasks, being able to rate the quality of cleaning to improve cleaning training and performance is difficult. While CMMS may capture work orders for cleaning to use in this regard, you are unable to run a consistent quality assurance program in the system.

Team Performance

By not tracking cleanings done by your staff or vendors, CMMS have limited insight into cleaning team member performance. With dedicated cleaning software, organizations are able to analyze team performance to identify and recognize top performing staff and identify training opportunities.

Legacy systems often fall short in tracking completed work due to their complex interfaces, making it difficult to get a clear picture of task completion. These systems lack real-time updates and intuitive reporting features, creating gaps in accountability. In contrast, modern softwares for cleaning validation like CrowdComfort provide an alternative for a more straightforward solution. Through accessing a simple platform managers can easily see where work has been done and can identify areas that need more attention.

Service Level Tracking & The Occupant Experience

When we build our facilities operations strategies, it's important we effectively communicate and measure our service levels for work orders, cleaning and other maintenance tasks.

While many organizations rely on CMMS reporting for some of this data, there are many facilities that provide experience solutions that provide this data in easy to understand dashboards out of the box.

Here are some service level tracking where your current system might be lacking:

Response & Resolution Rates

While understanding work order efficiency, it's important that you are tracking response and resolution times by work order type, team member, building location and other criteria. Response time is focused on response to the initial request and is the most important driver of occupant satisfaction. Resolution time is the time to resolve and issue and will differ the most based on the type of work order. These times are often standard dashboards in mobile-first facilities experience solutions.

Occupant Service Requests Functionality

While many CMMS offer online portals for occupants to submit work orders, these forms are often cumbersome to use which leads to little to no requests from occupants. This puts the pressure on the facilities team to not only resolve issues but to find them as well. Mobile Service Requests app can provide an easy interface for occupants to provide work order requests while also providing better data including precise location, work order type and imagery of the issue that the facilities team can use to ensure they have everything they need to fix the issue.

Occupant Experience Scores

While many facilities teams rely on common survey tools to understand performance, more modern mobile service requests apps have pre-built workflows to capture "Voice of Customer" data that reflects user experience with the work order requests they submit. This can be used to measure overall facilities team effectiveness and shared internally to show the great work done by your teams.

Modern mobile facilities apps can help CMMS provide a better user experience for both facilities team members and occupants of the space to improve identification and resolution of work orders while capturing valuable data that helps facilities team resolve work orders faster and track overall occupant sentiment for facilities services.

Looking Beyond Legacy System Limitations

It's clear that while our legacy CMMS systems are needed, their limitations require other solutions that improve data capture and the user experience while integrating with these foundational systems.

These systems often struggle with real-time updates, intuitive interfaces, and comprehensive tracking abilities that are critical for effective facilities management. They not only slow down operations but make it difficult to ensure service levels with work orders and cleaning tasks are met to your organization's standards. are completed to their highest potential. Finding solutions that are mobile and experience first can help augment your technology stack to improve data capture, enhance service levels and drive operational efficiency in your strategies.