What Software Are Using For Facility Management?

[davidshq (Dave Mackey)]

Hi All,

Wondering what folks are using to manage their facilities? aka CMMS/EAP software?

I see this thread:

Facilities Management

I’m the IT Solutions Director for eSPACE powered by Cool Solutions Group and would be happy to chat with you about our offerings. Looks like some folks here are already mentioned us (thanks!)… In short, we are an all-in-one facility management platform including a free mobile app on the Work Order side… Let me know if you would like to chat! Thanks, Tim

Which mentions Fiix Software, OpenMaint, eSpace (Cool Solutions).

I started to work on installing OpenMaint but the learning curve is a bit steep on installation and the documentation is lacking. I do plenty of LAMP installs, but this is more of a Java stack with unclear dependencies on other software…

What functionality in your CMMS/EAP do you find essential? What do you never use?

Thanks,
Dave

[ebusby (Eric Busby)]

We just dropped ServiceU and started using Planning Center Resources. All we use it for is scheduling rooms and resources, there is no tie in to our HVAC or Security/Entry systems. It is significantly better than ServiceU was. It works well for us.

[bbiddle (Ben Biddle)]

Currently evaluating our systems: we use ServiceU for room resources, SchoolDude for maintenance requests, Spiceworks for IT and Shelby for almost everything else. Oh and a few shared Excel spreadsheets floating around

[iXthus (Paul Tedder)]

Currently we use EMS for Event Management, TracerSC for managing our HVAC system, Kantech for Access Control and Events2HVAC for managing the link between EMS and TracerSC/Kantech.

We’ve recently switched from Arena to Rock as our ChMS and anticipate in a couple years moving from EMS to a similar type of module being developed for Rock.

As far as how I feel about these tools… using an Academic grading model I would give EMS a C (dropped from an A over the last year) TracerSC an A, Kantech a B and Events2HVAC an A+

[timcool]

Let me know if we can add additional information. There are a number of good solutions on the market.

[abaker (Andy Baker)]

Dave, this was discussed on another thread.
We have been on eSpace for a couple years now and our facilities/event planning team loves it!

[davidshq (Dave Mackey)]

Thanks everyone, I’m going to talk to our Facilities Management guy about this and may have further questions after doing so!

Dave

[davidshq (Dave Mackey)]

Hi Tim,

We use GSuite for our calendaring and when I spoke with our facilities manager he mentioned the big sticking point with your solution was that the syncing of events/etc. to the Google calendar seemed occasional and that he didn’t want folks needing to check in two spots. Maybe you can tell me a bit more about how this sync works and/or how other folks in our situation have handled it?

Thanks!
Dave

[timcool]

Hey Dave…thanks for the response. We actually have a .isc feature that we added about a year ago to provide for this functionality…let me know if you want to connect with our team to review further.

Are you going to Dallas in October?

Thanks

[davidshq (Dave Mackey)]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the response, apologize for the delay in replying.

We did try with the ICS file and it appears that Google is only polling the file once every few hours (up to 12 hrs between polls) which means a pretty big disconnect between what is in eSPACE and Google Calendar.

This doesn’t appear to be an eSPACE problem but a Google problem…I’m seeing complaints of it across a wide variety of products (e.g. Zendesk and SugarCRM).

I took a cursory look at Google’s Calendar API, it looks like this could be used to resolve the problem:

You can use the Google Calendar API to find and view public calendar events. If you’re authorized, you can also access and modify private calendars and events on those calendars.

Any chance of seeing such an integration in the near future?

I’m hoping to be there in October.