5 Ways Indoor Navigation Makes Life Easier for Facility Management [2023 update]

There are plenty of professions where the basic responsibilities of the role essentially have remained the same for decades. 

Facility Management (FM) is not one of them.

While the primary tasks of FM used to be maintenance and management of a facility, the roles of a facility manager are broadening to encompass more responsibilities and skill sets. 

Today, FM covers two main areas: ‘Space and infrastructure’ (hard FM) and ‘people and organization’ (soft FM). According to the International Facility Management Association, Facility Managers “make sure the places in which people work, play, learn and live are safe, comfortable, productive and sustainable.”

But, as buildings get bigger and smarter, FM gets more complex. 

An indoor map allows facility managers to get a clear overview of the built environment and visualize important data. Unlike many software solutions, indoor navigation doesn’t just fix one problem. It helps facility managers tackle several of their challenges without increasing the complexity of their job.

#1. Facility information

In its simplest form, indoor navigation is “just” a dynamic map. However, there’s no such thing as “just a map” - especially not if you’re in charge of a big venue like a corporate office, an airport, or a large convention center.

A dynamic indoor map of your building(s) allows you to get a clear overview of the facilities. By zooming in on the map, points of interest (POI) will appear, so that you can easily see which shops are located where in the duty-free area, how many people meeting room 156 has room for, or what equipment is available in Hall 3. 

With the dynamic mapping platform, MapsIndoors, you can set the visibility of your POIs in the included CMS system. This lets you determine what zoom levels (the more you zoom, the higher the zoom level and more details) a POI is visible on. For instance, you may want bigger POIs, such as rooms, to be visible on zoom levels 10-20, while you only want smaller POIs, such as fire extinguishers and sensors, to be visible on zoom levels 22-25. This way, you always have a clear overview of the facility no matter how many POIs you have.

#2. Building maintenance

As a facility manager, you have to ensure that the basic facilities are well-maintained and that you conduct proactive maintenance. The bigger and more complex the facility, the harder this is.

Keeping an overview of everything that needs maintenance is a challenging job, but poor wayfinding can quickly make it even more difficult. Finding the HVAC unit that needs repairing might be easy as you only have a handful of them, but finding a specific sensor can be a much more cumbersome task. 

With indoor maps, you can share the exact location of the device that needs repairing. You can even share the location both internally and externally through a link in a text message, making it easy for everyone to effortlessly go to where they need to go to.

#3. Space management

Speaking of sensors, finding an available meeting room can feel like finding a needle in a haystack for employees. If you have 100 meeting rooms, but only 16 of them are available, how can employees quickly find one of those 16 rooms? 

Studies show that most office employees spend excessive time hunting a room for their purposes, but it doesn’t have to be like that.

By integrating your motion sensors and room booking system with a mapping platform, employees can quickly get an overview of your spaces including available meeting rooms and desks. If a room has been booked, but there has been no movement in the room within the first ten minutes of the booking, the reservation will automatically be deleted, so the room can be booked and used by others. 

This setup will also help you uncover unused space. You might find that some rooms and desks are always occupied while others are left unused. This insight can be used to optimize your layout in order to fully utilize every inch of your facility.

Of course, employees (and guests, depending on your venue) can get directions to all POIs and not just booked meeting rooms and desks.

#4. Health, safety, and welfare

Part of FM is also making sure that the workplace is safe and suitable for the tasks being carried out there.

By integrating indoor navigation with your sensors, such as CO2 sensors and thermometers, you can easily keep track of the air quality, temperature, and more in each room and have it visualized on a map. This allows you to quickly detect when and where actions are needed.

Additionally, all fire hoses, extinguishers, and emergency exits can be added to the map as POIs, so they are searchable and easy to find for everyone who has access to your indoor navigation solution.

#5. Easy updating

Being a Facility Manager in 2023 is impossible without technology. But technology can quickly become a time waster if you rely on too many systems that all require manual updating.

By using an independent mapping platform with open interfaces, you can easily integrate it into your Facility Management (FM) system. This way, you only have to update the information in your FM system and changes will immediately be visible on your indoor map.

These are only a few examples of how indoor navigation is improving facility management. If you want to know more about what indoor navigation can do for your venue, reach out to us for a quick chat about your needs.