Facility Manager

Facility Manager keeps your own premises running: the plant, equipment and spaces your business occupies. It covers planned maintenance, the jobs that come out of it, and what a failure cost you.

It is deliberately separate from Field Service. Field Service is for billable work at a customer's site and its work orders carry a customer, a site address and an invoice reference. Facility maintenance is the opposite: non-billable work on premises you occupy, with no customer anywhere in it. The test is simple — if somebody could be invoiced for the job, it belongs in Field Service.

The dashboard

The module opens on a dashboard rather than a list, because the questions a maintenance manager actually asks are countable ones and no list answers them. Four of them sit across the top:

• Overdue — open jobs past the date they were due. A job nobody has started but which is not due yet is planning, not failure, and is deliberately not counted here.
• Due this week — what is coming, so it can be resourced before it becomes the first number.
• Critical kit open — open jobs against equipment you marked critical. Usually the first thing worth knowing.
• Unassigned — open jobs that are nobody's yet. This is the most common way maintenance work quietly rots.

Below those:

• Planned maintenance on time — of the planned jobs completed in the last ninety days, how many were finished by the date they were due. This is the figure an auditor asks for. Before anything has been completed it reads as a dash rather than 100%: a tenant who has done nothing is not fully compliant, and we are not going to tell you otherwise.
• Downtime — recorded against completed jobs over the last thirty days, with the part that stopped you trading called out separately. Broken and broken-in-a-way-that-stopped-us-selling are different problems.
• The estate — sites, spaces, equipment and active schedules, each a link to the list behind it.
• Recent jobs and coming up — the last few jobs raised, and the next schedules falling due.

Every figure respects what you are allowed to see. If your account covers one site, these are that site's numbers, not the estate's.

Spaces

A Location in OPS360 is a site. Spaces describe the inside of one: building, floor, wing, room, area or plant room, nested as deeply as you need. Equipment and jobs are addressed to these, so "everything in Building A" becomes one question rather than a list you maintain by hand.

A space can only sit inside another space at the same site, and a space that still contains equipment or other spaces cannot be removed until you have moved what is in it.

Equipment

Equipment is the maintenance view of an asset you already own. The financial record — purchase cost, depreciation, insurance, disposal — stays in Asset Manager; Facility Manager adds what maintenance needs:

• Where it is — the space it sits in.
• Criticality, and whether its failure stops you trading. This changes what happens: work raised against trading-critical equipment jumps the queue.
• Meters — run hours, cycles or distance, so maintenance can be scheduled by use rather than by date.
• Instruments watching it — any devices registered in Connected Devices that monitor this equipment.

Maintenance plans

A plan decides when work is due and raises the job itself. There are three kinds.

• By date — every so many days, weeks or months. You choose whether the next date is counted from when the work was actually done, or from the date it was due. The second keeps a statutory inspection on its cadence even when a visit runs late.
• By use — every so many run hours or cycles. A generator that barely ran does not need servicing; one that ran flat out does.
• By condition — when a reading from an instrument watching that equipment falls outside its expected range.

A plan can cover named equipment, or a space and everything beneath it — one rule for every fire door in a building. You can set a lead time so jobs are raised a few days early and can actually be scheduled, and you can list the steps the job involves; each becomes a tick box on every job the plan raises.

The maintenance board

Every job on your own premises appears here, tagged with where it came from: a plan that came due, a meter that passed its interval, a sensor that went out of range, or somebody who noticed something broken. Sensor-raised jobs are marked, because a freezer defrosting is a different kind of problem from a service falling due.

Every job carries a reference such as MO-0042, so it can be quoted to a contractor over the phone or written on a paper worksheet.

Opening a job gives you the steps to tick off, time spent, labour and parts cost, a contractor invoice reference, and how long the equipment was out of use — including whether that stopped you trading. A completed or cancelled job is final and cannot be edited back open, so the record of what was done and when stays trustworthy.

Working with Connected Devices

If you use Connected Devices, list the instruments that watch a piece of equipment on its record and write a plan with a By condition trigger. When a reading falls outside the band you set on the device, a job is raised against that equipment automatically, carrying a link to the reading that caused it. Only one open job is raised per piece of equipment, so a fridge left open overnight produces one job rather than one every fifteen minutes.

Connected Devices is a separate add-on. Facility Manager works without it — planned maintenance and meter readings entered by hand need no sensors at all.

Settings

Facility Manager › Settings holds the handful of decisions that apply across the module. Each one changes real behaviour — none of them is a preference that quietly does nothing.

• Raise planned jobs automatically — on by default. Turning it off stops schedules producing jobs while leaving the schedules and their dates alone, which is what you want during a shutdown. It is not the same as switching off each schedule, which you would then have to undo one at a time.
• Default lead time — how far ahead of its due date a new schedule raises its job, so there is time to plan it. Changing this does not re-time schedules you have already written; those keep the lead time you gave them.
• Priority for sensor-raised jobs — by default an excursion on trading-critical equipment is urgent and everything else is high. If sensor jobs are crowding out the rest of your board you can pin them all to one level instead.
• Require completion notes — off by default. Turned on, a job cannot be completed with nothing written in it. Thirty jobs that say nothing is the same as no maintenance history at all, and a written history is the first thing an insurer asks for after a failure.
• Job reference prefix — every job gets a reference you can read out over the phone, such as MO-0042. Change the prefix to suit how your team talks about them.

The reference counter itself cannot be set backwards. Two jobs sharing a reference could never be told apart afterwards, which would undo the point of having one.

What you need

Facility Manager is included in the Workplace Enterprise tier, which also grants Asset Manager. Condition-triggered jobs additionally require the Connected Devices add-on.