Facility management software: what a suite covers and which part hurts day to day

What facility management means

Facility management is the trade of making a building work without the people inside having to think about it. It is usually split in two halves. The hard half is the property and its installations: heating and cooling, electricity, plumbing, lifts, fire protection. The soft half is services to people: cleaning, reception, security, post, catering. In a mid-size company nobody has that title on their card; it goes by office services or general services, and often falls to whoever also buys the stationery and organises office moves.

The software for this trade grew up around those with a great deal of floor space: banks with hundreds of branches, operators of office towers, public bodies. That is where its modules come from, and why a demo can leave you feeling that you lack nearly everything. You do not: the program was simply built for another scale.

The areas of a suite, one by one

Not every suite has everything, and each vendor groups things its own way. These are the areas that recur most, what the program does in each and whether Bedel covers it:

Ten rows and a single «yes». That is deliberate: this page is not trying to persuade you that a fault-reporting tool amounts to a suite.

The part that hurts day to day

Ask whoever runs facilities where the week went. They will rarely say «on the occupancy plan». They will say things like these:

• The report that arrives five ways. An email, a message to a personal phone, a remark by the coffee machine, a note left at reception. None records the time, and two weeks on nobody remembers who said it first.
• The repeated question. «Any news on the air conditioning?» With nowhere to look it up, the same person always answers, from memory.
• The silent supplier. They were rung on Tuesday; by Thursday they have not turned up. Did they accept it? For which day? If the job was given over the phone, there is nothing to show them.
• What belongs to the landlord. In a rented office, a good share of what fails is the building owner's to fix, and claiming it without the date of the first report is arguing from memory.
• The inspection that lapses. Extinguishers, air conditioning, the electrical inspection. An authorised maintenance company or an inspection body carries them out, but watching the date is down to you.
• Coming back from holiday. Whatever was half done when you left exists only in your head.

All six are one gap seen from six sides: a record that writes itself is missing. That is reactive maintenance with a little planned work, the sixth and seventh rows of the table. The rest of the suite can wait until the company has more sites or more floor space.

When a suite is needed

There are clear signs that the problem no longer fits in a small tool:

• You manage several buildings and management wants to compare, on one screen, what each spends and how long each takes.
• Hybrid working forces you to share out desks and rooms daily, and to measure how many are used.
• There are full-time in-house technicians, with their own stores.
• Contractors are so many that their paperwork and expiry dates need a place of their own.
• A certification or an audit demands each machine's history and its records in the same place.

If that is you, look for a suite or a CMMS; what separates one from the other is in maintenance software, and the specific case of a property, in building maintenance software. If yours is an office and little more, the page tuned to that case is maintenance software for offices.

What the law asks of whoever runs the building

Whoever runs facilities answers, often unknowingly, for two matters backed by law. In Spain, the first is the periodic inspection of installations: fire, heating and cooling, electricity, lift, water. Which ones affect an office and how often is in regulations for offices, and how a program handles them, in mandatory inspections software. The second is coordination with the contractors who come in to work. The first is known as statutory maintenance, and no tool relieves you of that responsibility; at most, it reminds you of the day.

Where Bedel fits, and what it does not do

Bedel stays in the reactive row and brushes the planned one. It is not a CMMS and not a facility management suite. It works with a company WhatsApp number and a list of people allowed to report. Anyone on that list describes the fault as they would to a colleague, typed, spoken or with a photo, and gets a ticket number straight away. From there Bedel does what you do by hand today: it passes it to the technician or supplier who handles that category, who replies from their own WhatsApp with nothing to install; it tells the person who reported it when it has been accepted and when it is sorted; and if the deadline you set runs out, it raises it to whoever is above. Urgent things do not wait for Monday: they ring the on-call phone whatever the hour.

At month end you have an Excel file with each ticket and its three moments, report, acceptance and closure, exactly what is needed to sit down with a supplier or with the landlord. And once a month, whoever runs maintenance receives on WhatsApp the dated inspections that are approaching. The detail for an office is in incidents in offices, and for any other premises, in incident management on WhatsApp.

The whole table bar that row stays outside: no space, no bookings, no contracts, no inventory, no consumption. Nor does it store records or certificates, it does not connect to the suite or portal you already have, and it does not bring several sites together: each site gets its own account and number. And only people on the list can report; a visitor or a customer cannot open tickets. Data is stored in the European Union.