Buildings are not static structures. They are complex networks of systems and equipment that are often fickle and issue-prone. Experienced property teams know that anything that can go wrong, will eventually go wrong.

When a good issue management strategy is put in pace, it can alleviate a lot of the headaches that come with running a building. An effective strategy will streamline tasks and can even help you realize cost savings as you work to optimize team processes and building operations.

Here are four things your team needs to manage building issues efficiently.

1. An automated detection tool: Your building automation system gives you the ability to control your building, but no information about what’s actually going on. This is where your energy management software comes in, providing an overview of your building operations, and offering a place to centralize your building data, manage workflow, track logs, and ways to explore potential problems before they occur.

A good energy management tool will utilize machine learning to automatically find and notify your team about issues related to building and equipment performance. Setting thresholds for energy and water consumption, temperature and humidity, and emergency equipment activation can help you save time and money when you’re instantly notified that your building has breached its targets for one of these.

Having a system in place that automatically discovers problems and notifies the right person when corrective action is needed allows management teams to spend more time adding value for their tenants in other areas.

2. Collaboration: Often, resolving a building issue requires more than one person or even more than one team. Building teams need an easy and efficient way to communicate who’s doing what and when to keep everyone on the same page.

These days, a convoluted email thread just won’t cut it. A communication tool needs to provide simple conversation tracking and work for multiple parties across multiple devices so people can provide updates no matter if they’re at their desk or on the go.

3. Issue history tracking: Does the same issue keep popping up over and over again? Without issue history tracking, it’s hard to know. Keeping logs of how often an issue occurs and what was done to resolve it can save teams valuable time when they go to investigate. Did your team solve the root cause of the issue or apply a quick fix? Is one of your building systems developing so many issues that in needs to be replaced?

Keeping a centralized, detailed log of issue occurrences and resolutions will give you a high-level overview of your team’s and your building’s efficiency and enable you to ensure all systems are operating at top levels of performance.

4. An escalation policy: There are a million things going on in your building at any given time and it’s important to keep your entire team accountable for tackling issues as they come. An escalation policy is a series of rules that dictate who gets notified and when if an issue goes unacknowledged or takes too long to get resolved. It’s critical to make sure your entire team understands what this policy looks like and why it is enforced.

Now that you know what you need for an airtight issue management strategy and what to look for in the tools that will help you implement it, take a look at how Aquicore’s Issue Management Tool works.