Companies turn to Integrated Workplace Management Systems (IWMS) to organize and streamline their data and operations and gain the most value from their real estate and property portfolios. The organizations that can benefit the most from a modern, powerful IWMS often have more than five million square feet in holdings—sometimes much more. At that scale, even small inefficiencies can represent enormous waste and missed opportunity costs.

There are many discrete workplace management systems, such as Computer-Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) and Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS), that are designed for use in one specialized area. An IWMS, on the other hand, can deliver results in multiple areas, such as capital projects, real estate and facilities management; because the system is integrated, these results are greater than the sum of their individual parts when they’re combined together. An IWMS provides users with an accurate, complete, relevant and current pool of knowledge in multiple areas, which enables organizations to make the best possible data-driven decisions.

Integration: Your Workplace Management System’s Key Advantage

A fully-integrated IWMS makes the data collected in one module of your workplace management system available across all modules. It provides a single view of all the people, places and things in a portfolio to set everyone and everything up for success—and to spot potential trouble areas in sufficient time to head them off.

Think of an IWMS as a building held up by pillars: The pillars are the separate modules that make up the whole IWMS. The more pillars a building has—or the more specialized modules your IWMS has—the stronger it is. Just as the pillars work together to support the overall structure, the specialized modules work together to make your IWMS a powerful tool for managing multiple aspects of your enterprise. For example, an IWMS module that handles space management could be used to identify and repurpose unused square footage in a facility, which could help avoid new capital construction costs. While capital projects would be managed by a separate module within the IWMS, a fully-integrated IWMS would be able to share data across both modules, allowing all relevant departments and workers to have access to the same information to see what’s already being handled, and what still needs to be done.

Integrate Your Legacy Data and Smart Building Sensors into Your IWMS

A powerful and robust IWMS can incorporate your legacy system data into its modules, freeing it for additional use and analysis. Moreover, an IWMS may be integrated with your existing instrumentation and the latest Internet of Things sensors designed to automate operations for smart buildings in areas such as lighting, heating, air conditioning, security systems and more. These sensors, when used in combination with the data and analytics provided by your IWMS, can show you ways to automatically conserve energy, lower maintenance costs and use space more efficiently. Along with providing you with smoother-running facilities—and raising the levels of both productivity and comfort of your employees—this can give you a comprehensive top-to-bottom view of all the facilities in your portfolio. It’s all made possible by the integration capabilities of your IWMS.

Mobile Data Integration

Mobile apps designed to work with your IWMS can extend the utility of your data and the functionality of your IWMS beyond the desktop and into the field. That means extending your reach and visibility, as mobile apps enable your workers to document additional findings then and there at job sites by using their own phones or tablets. Findings recorded at the moment of discovery are likely to be more accurate than those recorded upon return to the office; workers are also more likely to collect data and make reports if it’s convenient for them to do so. The result is a more accurate and comprehensive dataset to draw upon for your strategic business decisions, all made possible through well-integrated systems.

Ideally, your IWMS’s mobile apps should be designed to not only integrate with your IWMS, but with each other as well. The more your data and analytics can be shared across multiple modules and apps, the more functionality you’ll be able to extract from it.

Getting Started

To achieve the results you want, your choice of an IWMS is critical. Consider IBM TRIRIGA®, which uses a single powerful platform to integrate modules charged with managing capital projects, facilities, real estate, operations and energy usage

Equally critical: Make sure you choose the right vendor to get your organization up and running on TRIRIGA. TRIRIGA implementation and data migration and consolidation for any enterprise with a massive commercial real estate portfolio is a job for experienced specialists. With special customized solutions designed for various industries such as education, government, finance and manufacturing, eCIFM has helped hundreds of organizations get started with TRIRIGA. Our TRIRIGA services include software written specifically to speed implementation; we also have our own suite of integrated mobile apps designed to help your organization use TRIRIGA to its fullest potential.

Our team includes some of the world’s leading TRIRIGA experts. Many of them were longtime users of TRIRIGA themselves, so we know what users need and expect. If your organization is looking to get more value from its CRE portfolio, let’s get started.