Microcorp Technology is currently conducting a workshop programme to discuss further on the direction and action plan for one of our biggest main project we are currently coordinating.

Coincidently, there is also an advanced asset management course conducted by a well known public listed company just next door to our meeting room. We had a chat with one of the foreign speaker during a lunch break and one of our manager asked whether he had heard of ARCHIBUS. He said “Yes” and told us that he did one consulting job for Gillette in China where they are using ARCHIBUS. Unfortunately, he said that the company attending the course might not be interested to use other tool yet mainly because they wanted to optimize the system that they currently have which is SAP.

Back to our main focus, one of the most popular but also the most underutilized tool for a management team is the Mind Map. Here’s how our mind map looks like when we had a bunch of people locked inside a room during our first day.

Other issues were being brought out and resolved were:

1. Project Management
2. Project Timeline and Dateline
3. Facility Management Details
4. Management Tools
5. Contract Management

By the end of this activity, we hope to achieve a single minded and the most efficient pathway for a better future for Microcorp Technology.

After working on this project the past several months, we would like to announce our CFMS Web Central (powered by ARCHIBUS) is now up and running. We would like to thank all the effort and hard work our data entry team has put in and to all our system engineers for setting up the system in a very short notice.

UiTM CFMS Web Central Screenshot

Any comments or suggestion is highly appreciated.

A Happy Productive New Year 2008

We all love to read magazine don’t we? To start off our new year, we have a few facility management magazine that we would like to have all of our staff, clients and to anybody who are in the facility management industry to read.

FMJ Online Magazine

FMJ Online is published by IFMA written specifically for professionals who are concerned with developing and maintaining productive workplaces. It is available for free as a downloadable PDF. You can download the November/December 2007 version here.

FM Magazine

Facility Management Magazine is published by a Melbourne Australia based Niche Media. This magazine is unfortunately not free but you can subscribe to this magazine for only USD75 for a total of 6 issues yearly.

We will scout around for other Facility Management magazine available online. If you happen to know about any that we might have not heard of, do leave a comment below and we will check it out and feature it here.

International Facility Management Association (IFMA) defined Facility Management as:

“A profession that encompasses multiple disciplines to ensure functionality of the built environment by integrating people, place, process and technology.”

Extracting some text-book material of Facility Management and its relation towards technology:

Facilities and physical infrastructure management is a critical business function. Comprising 25 to 50 percent of a company’s/organization’s fixed assets and operating costs, facilities are significant resources that must be efficiently managed in order for a business to succeed in a globally competitive market.

Facilities information crosses an organization’s traditional department boundaries. For example:-

• A CFO evaluating mergers requires accurate real estate portfolio information.
• A CEO generates business plan projections that drive a planner’s space forecasts.
• A space planner allocating resources must integrate data from all departments and communicate the result to architects.
• A move planner must coordinate data from the facilities, telecommunications, and maintenance departments.

Facilities information also crosses the boundaries of traditional software applications:

• CAD drawings depict a facility’s structure and areas.
• Databases store alphanumeric data about rooms, equipment, furniture, repairs, and breakdowns.
• Spreadsheets calculate areas, rent, and maintenance costs.
• Routed approvals flow through email.
• Web browsers pull casual and remote users directly into the workflow.

As such, to implement facilities management automation, you need a specialized package that understands the corporate roles and responsibilities, understands the business missions and what each role requires to achieve them, knows how to validate and flow facility information through an organization, and can integrate diverse technologies into a unified whole.

In our next series of introducing facility management solutions, we won’t bore you with even more text related material. Instead, we’ll have a lot of screenshots and probably video presentation or slide shows which we think would be more exciting! Hope you had enjoy our brief introduction to ARCHIBUS and have a productive day ahead.

We hope that all our readers would benefit from all the information that we have shown and will continue to support us.

We wish to welcome you to Microcorp Technology Facility Management blog. The purpose of this blog is to give all readers as well as our own staff an insight on activities and maybe some public plans that we have and already did. By doing this, we can all share our experience and knowledge together and create value that could improve our productivity.

Feel free to drop any comments on the comment box below. Updates will be done regularly. Happy reading!