Facility manager software and facility technician software are usually the same product with two different jobs to do, and the second job is the one that gets neglected. The technician needs today's work on a phone, in the plant room, with gloves on. The manager needs the year: what is due, what it will cost, what is deferred and what last year actually consumed. A product can be excellent at the first and useless at the second, and it will still demo well, because demos are built around the phone.
The manager's four questions, and where products fail them
What is due in the next quarter. What has been deferred and what would it cost to clear. What did this asset consume in the last twelve months. And what does the whole building's condition look like against what it would cost to replace. Products commonly answer the first well and the other three through a report builder, which means the answer exists but nobody produces it monthly, which means it does not exist.
Why the phone half still matters to the manager
The manager's answers are only as true as the technician's filing, so the mobile experience is not a separate concern, it is the input to every figure above. If closing a job takes six taps and a signal, jobs get closed in batches on Friday from memory, and the cost history quietly becomes an approximation. Judge the phone half as though it were your own reporting, because it is.
What to take into a trial
Your own asset list, a real deferral with a price on it, and a question you have been asked before and could not answer. If the product can take those three and give the answer back without a services engagement, it fits a single building. If it needs configuring first, it was built for an estates department with a project budget, and the fit will not improve after purchase.
Questions people ask about facility manager software
Is there software just for the manager?
There are reporting layers sold that way, and for one building they are usually solving a problem created by the underlying record being thin. Fix the record first; a dashboard over incomplete history is a confident wrong answer.
What if the technicians will not use it?
Then no figure the manager reports is reliable, and that is the first problem to solve. Adoption follows from closing a job being faster than writing it on paper, which is a product question, not a training question.
Do the free worksheets help the manager specifically?
Yes: the condition index, the backlog by system, the annual plan cost and the preventive versus reactive comparison are all manager questions, and they work from your own figures without any of the record existing yet.