7 Principles for Accelerating Facility Maintenance Issue Resolution

The Challenge of Facility Maintenance

In today’s complex facilities, maintenance issues create significant operational challenges. The traditional process—finding problems, creating tickets, verifying issues, scheduling appropriate personnel, ensuring proper equipment availability, and finally resolving the problem—involves numerous handoffs and considerable time investment.

Meanwhile, maintenance demands are increasing. According to JLL’s State of Facilities Maintenance survey, 56% of Facility Managers report increased in world order volume and 43% cite understaffing on their teams. The proliferation of technology-enabled devices throughout facilities has expanded the maintenance scope and organizations face staffing shortages due to budget constraints and retiring staff. This combination creates mounting pressure on facility management teams.

The following seven principles, originally published in the FM Professional Magazine, help streamline maintenance operations, reduce unnecessary personnel involvement, eliminate non-issues, and accelerate resolution times. These are also the foundation of the Sensfix platform, which enables companies to standardize and streamline facilities maintenance for their organizations.

1. Enable Issue Reporting on the Spot

Allow employees, tenants, staff or maintenance workers to submit maintenance requests immediately when and where issues occur. Traditional approaches—taking notes for later entry, calling a help desk, or sending emails/texts when remembered—add delays and create opportunities for information loss.

Implementing solutions that allow “on the spot” issue creation with supporting evidence (photos/videos) speeds up the process dramatically. This approach eliminates front-end handoffs by sending reports directly to a central repository. It also captures issues that might otherwise go unreported due to cumbersome reporting processes.

2. Vet Issues Immediately (and Deflect When Possible)

Many reported issues can be resolved without dispatching technicians. By implementing brief diagnostic interviews (automated by AI) at the point of reporting, common problems can be addressed with immediate guidance or steps to fix.

This approach mirrors successful customer support strategies that measure “deflection rates”—the percentage of issues resolved without escalation. Effective deflection not only saves resources but also provides faster resolution for facility users.

3. Capture and Centralize All Issues Using Multi-Modal Inputs

While staff-reported issues are important, many facility problems go undetected by human observation. A comprehensive approach incorporates multiple detection methods:

• Environmental or equipment sensors can monitor conditions like temperature, humidity, and air quality
• CCTV enabled with AI can identify issues like doors left ajar or unauthorized access
• IoT-enabled equipment can self-report jams, failures, or maintenance needs
• Predictive analytics can identify potential failures before they occur (e.g., pump vibration or noise patterns indicating imminent breakdown)
• Computer vision can detect safety hazards like spills or obstructions from existing camera feeds

Integrating these diverse inputs creates a complete picture of facility condition and needs, many detected automatically and resolved through predefined response protocols. Using multi-modal inputs, all of the issues – those reported by humans and those coming from cameras, IoT/smart devices or sensors also get pulled into the same system.

4. Get the Right Person Involved Immediately

Industry sources suggest that maintenance technicians spend between 25-50% of their time actually doing maintenance activities and that the rest is spent on less-value-added activities: seeking approvals, waiting for instructions, travel, or getting parts or equipment. Effective maintenance systems match issues with properly qualified personnel who have the necessary expertise, tools, materials and vehicles.

Smart assignment and routing can dramatically reduce wasted time and ensure first-time resolution of issues.

5. Automate Key Tasks

Recurring maintenance tasks present excellent automation opportunities. Examples include:

• Providing self-service reset instructions when common equipment failures are reported
• Automating the workflow from issue detection to technician assignment for routine problems
• Delivering standardized, step-by-step repair procedures for complex equipment so it can be fixed or maintained consistently, and these visits are documented for audits and record-keeping
• Triggering immediate responses to predefined events (e.g. unauthorized access or spills captured on CCTV)

These automations reduce manual intervention while ensuring consistent, compliant execution.

6. Streamline Documentation and Reporting

Effective maintenance management requires comprehensive documentation for compliance, analysis, and continuous improvement. However, traditional documentation processes are often burdensome and incomplete.

Mobile-friendly digital tools that capture operations and maintenance activities in real-time improve accuracy while reducing administrative overhead. Structured data collection supports analytics that identify recurring issues, maintenance patterns, and improvement opportunities.

7. Enable Clear Communication and Closed Loops

Effective communication between issue reporters, maintenance managers, and service personnel improves first-time resolution rates and satisfaction levels. Establishing clear channels for additional information gathering, status updates, and resolution confirmation creates transparency throughout the process. Providing a way for easy communication as the issue is reported, personnel is scheduled, during the repair process and post-repair allows for issues to be resolved more completely and in a satisfactory way.

Closing the communication loop with issue reporters not only provides better service but also encourages continued participation in the maintenance reporting process.

Follow the 7 Principles to Streamline Maintenance

These seven principles provide a framework for transforming facility maintenance from a reactive, labor-intensive and slow process to a more proactive, efficient and speedy system. By addressing the entire maintenance lifecycle, supported by technology, from detection through resolution, organizations can reduce costs, improve facility conditions, and enhance occupant satisfaction. Implementing these approaches, maintenance teams can handle more issues with fewer resources while providing better service to facility users.