The failure mode of a CAFM is not that it does not work. It is that it is bought, populated badly, used by two people and abandoned in month eight, at which point the estate is back on spreadsheets and out the cost of the license. Nearly all of that is decided in the first ninety days, and most of it is decided by what gets loaded first. This page is a sequence rather than a feature list: what to put in, in what order, who has to touch it in week one, and how to tell at day ninety whether it has taken.
Load the assets that matter, not all of them
The instinct is to survey everything before switching on, and it is the most reliable way to never switch on. Load the assets whose failure costs real money or real disruption: plant, roofs, lifts, major services, anything with a certificate. That is usually a couple of hundred items rather than several thousand, and it can be walked in a week. The long tail can arrive as work orders touch it, which has the additional benefit of being recorded by the person who actually saw it rather than by a surveyor who saw it once.
Get work orders in from week one, from everybody
The record only stays true if the ordinary work of the week flows through it, so the request route has to change on day one: no more emails to the facilities inbox, no more corridor conversations that become jobs. That is an organizational change rather than a software one, and it is the part that fails. Make requests easier than the email was, tell people once, and then hold the line for a month. Every request that goes round the system is a hole in the backlog figure that the system will later be blamed for.
CAD CAFM: drawings, and when to defer them
CAD CAFM, where floor plans drive the space record, is genuinely powerful and is also where implementations stall for months. If your drawings are current, load them. If they are two refits out of date, defer: a space record with areas and occupancy but no plans still produces the utilization figure, and the figure is what the decision needs. Plans can follow once the system is in daily use, and by then you will know which buildings are worth surveying, which is a cheaper question than surveying all of them first.
How to tell at day ninety whether it has taken
Three tests, all cheap. Can somebody who is not you close a work order on a phone without asking how. Does the asset register contain a condition recorded in the last thirty days by somebody in the field rather than at implementation. And can the system produce your four figures without help. Check them against the ones you worked before you bought: on the sheets here, 60% utilization with $168,000 carried by empty desks, $30 a square foot, a backlog growing 22.5 hours a week, and a $70,000 annual gap in the sinking fund. If the system's numbers and your numbers disagree, that is the most useful conversation of the whole project.
Questions people ask about how to use cafm software
What should I load into a CAFM first?
The assets whose failure costs money or disruption: plant, roofs, lifts, major services and anything carrying a certificate. That is usually a couple of hundred items and a week of walking. Loading everything before going live is the most common reason a CAFM never goes live at all.
Do I need CAD floor plans to use CAFM software?
Not to start. A space record with areas and occupancy produces the utilization figure, which is what most decisions need. If your drawings are current, load them; if they are two refits old, defer the survey until the system is in daily use and you know which buildings justify it.
Why do computer aided facilities management software implementations fail?
Usually because the ordinary work of the week keeps going round the system: requests by email, jobs agreed in corridors, conditions recorded nowhere. The record then diverges from reality, the figures stop being trusted, and the system is blamed for a process problem. Changing the request route in week one is the single highest-return decision in the project.
How do I know it is working after three months?
Somebody other than you can close a work order on a phone unaided; the register holds a condition recorded in the field in the last month; and the four figures come out of the system. Compare those figures with the ones you worked before buying, and treat any disagreement as the most valuable output of the first quarter.