In the ever evolving world of facilities management, staying compliant, efficient, and proactive is more critical than ever. As buildings become smarter and regulations more stringent, the tools we use to manage them must evolve too. Enter Naviam’s Facilities-iQ Connector, a powerful integration with SFG20, designed to revolutionize how organizations handle building maintenance within IBM’s Maximo Application Suite (MAS) Manage. Naviam is proud to be a founding partner of SFG20, committed to delivering high quality solutions for effective asset management and reliable maintenance to keep compliant with ever evolving regulations.

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What is SFG20 and Facilities-iQ?

SFG20 is the industry standard for building maintenance specification. Its extensive library of schedules covers more than 70 different asset types, plus the fabric of the building itself.

Created in 1990, in response to the need for a standard that would drive legal compliance,SFG20 is used by organizations in a wide range of sectors, spanning healthcare, education, government, retail, residential, and many more, to ensure safe, legal and competent building maintenance.

Facilities-iQ is a new smart software solution to intelligently manage your building maintenance compliance.

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The Challenge: Manual Maintenance Schedule Integration

Historically, integrating SFG20 maintenance schedules into MAS Manage was a labor intensive process. Facilities teams had to manually input data from SFG20 PDFs into Maximo’s Job Plans, an error prone and time consuming task, especially when dealing with thousands of schedules. This manual method also made it difficult to keep schedules up to date, leading to potential compliance risks and inefficiencies.

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The Solution: Naviam’s SFG20 Facilities-iQ Connector

Naviam’s SFG20 Facilities-iQ Connector addresses these challenges head on. Acting as abridge between MAS Manage and SFG20, the connector automates the entire process of importing, mapping, and updating maintenance schedules.

What SFG20 refer to as “Maintenance Schedules” would typically be referred to in MAS Manage as “Job Plans”. Previously turning Maintenance Schedules into Job Plans was a manual process, where someone would physically enter data into MAS Manage from PDF documents provided by SFG20. This takes time. If there are 1000s of schedules there is a lot of work, and that doesn’t even consider keeping them up to date. To add to that, manual data entry also opens up the risk of human error.

Naviam’s SFG20 Classic Connector took the process of manually entering the Job Plans away and replaced it with an automated process.

Naviam’s SFG20 Facilities-iQ Connector is an updated version, utilizing the new API. It sees greater functionality and a superior run speed. What the Connector can achieve in minutes is what might have taken days using the historic manually entered method. This latest version can also automatically create master PMs and assign job plans too it, calculating and setting the frequencies and sequences at the same time.

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Key Benefits

• Automation at Scale: What once took days can now be done in minutes. The connector can create up to 120 job plans per minute, depending on complexity.
• Real Time Updates: With API integration, updates from SFG20 are automatically reflected in MAS Manage, ensuring schedules remain current.
• Reduced Manual Input: Automation scripts handle the heavy lifting, requiring minimal user intervention after initial setup.
• Improved Accuracy: By eliminating manual data entry, the risk of human error is significantly reduced.

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How It Works: A Functional Overview

SFG20 Button

The “Manage SFG20 Regimes / Job Plans” Button can be found in the select action menu on the Job Plans Application. When clicked, a new dialog box will open. From there, the “Update Regime List” button can be clicked to populate the regime list on this table. Users can then select organizations and sites to map the SFG20 regimes to.

When the activate box is ticked, the schedules for the corresponding regimes and mappings will be turned into job plans and master PMs.

The “Create / Update Job Plans from SFG20” button under the Actions drop down menu triggers the creation or update of job plans in MAS Manage. It is recommended that for the initial use, this option should be chosen before activating the escalation. The process can take quite some time depending on the number of schedules and regimes being turned into job plans. As a general guide, 120 job plans can be created in 1 minute. This is not exact as job plans can have multiple tasks.

Once the process has completed, there will be a list of new job plans and master PM records.

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SFG20 Escalation / Cron Task

The escalation can be used to trigger the automation script to update any changes to existing job plans, or new job plans from SFG20 API connection.

Most of this is done in the background. If there are any issues relating to mapping of SFG20’s Skilling names to a Craft in MAS Manage, alerts can be emailed to the designated person by adding them to the person group.

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Job Plans

Job plans are created using the information gathered from SFG20. The job plan description matches the descriptions in SFG20. Each job plan has an SFG20 Details section displaying information such as Regime name, Schedule number, and locations where the same4Naviam’s SFG20 Integration schedule is to be carried out. There will be one or more Job Plan Tasks created for each job plan, along with corresponding Planned Labor records.

Each task will have a criticality value and steps to be conducted by the assigned labor that can be viewed using the long description box in the description field. By default, attachments will be added to each task in the form of a URL link. This link takes the user to a Facilities-iQ page should they wish to view the task or check anything on the SFG20 side.

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Master PMs

Master PM records are created by default when all the job plans have been created and processed. The master PMs are created and named based on the mappings table set up in the job plans application. The frequencies are automatically calculated, and the job plan sequences are calculated and added correctly too.

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Conclusion

Naviam’s SFG20 Facilities-iQ Connector is a game changer for facilities management professionals using MAS Manage. By automating the integration of SFG20’s industry standard maintenance schedules, it empowers organizations to operate more efficiently, remain compliant, and focus on strategic initiatives rather than administrative tasks.

As buildings become more complex and compliance more critical, tools like this connector are not just helpful, they’re essential.