How SFG20 Facilities-iQ Integrates with FM systems

Integration between SFG20 and your FM systems is really simple. At SFG20, we have an API key to connect the latest version of the SFG20 standard into your FM systems. Want to know how this works in practice? For the next 20 minutes, you will learn how you can integrate the SFG20 software solution directly into your CMMS system to get access to the latest version of the SFG20 standard.

Jump over to the webinar to find out more, but if you've got any questions, let us know in the comments of this video.

Paul Bullard: So just to begin, we are talking today about the challenges that people have around SFG20 and bringing that content into your operational systems. The purpose of Facilities-iQ was to break down those barriers and help the industry consume the content that we're very proud of, and make sure that everyone's delivering their maintenance in line with the SFG20 standard.

So if we start at the beginning, SFG20 began as a book, and my own previous experience was it would be a printed-out manual in a boiler room, or it would be something, a piece of paper attached to, physically attached to an asset so that when people visited those assets, they'd have an idea of the things they needed to carry out to maintain that asset in line with legislation.

Now, the trouble with a paper document, or even as you can see on the screen, a PDF or a Microsoft Excel book or a Word document, or even an XML file, which is a way of transferring data from one system to another, is that they're all fixed at a point in time. Those files, once they're produced, don't carry across all of the many updates and changes either in code of practice or a standard or legislation that SFG20 provide into the SFG20 content on an ongoing basis.

You also have the situation of once you've brought those types of documents into your operational systems, that any changes you are making to that content within those systems is moving away from the standard. What you're also doing is not allowing for the updates of the standard to actually flow into those systems because we've now varied the content.

We also have to appreciate in facilities management software, be it a CMMS, a CAFM, an IWMS, or one of the many other acronyms that companies label themselves with in the industry, those processes within those systems can be very different. You can also have a different approach to how individual systems do things like overriding tasks or even the strategies for how you are implementing your assets and how you're actually collating your work orders within your buildings.

And we need to be mindful of that as we're providing this information and make the data as clear and simple as possible to consume. Finally, we're looking at breaking down the barriers, and I mean that in terms of technical barriers and also commercial. We're looking for as many people to be able to bring this technology into your organisation without facing any limitations or restrictions that make this not accessible to different organisations.

So our vision for the API is we're looking to bring custom schedules into people's FM solutions. We want to create the opportunity that whatever you are producing through the SFG20 content, through Facilities-iQ, can easily flow into your downstream systems so that the data can be used correctly.

Actually be made available to any of your users, be them a desktop user or someone who's out in the field carrying out the work. We've got to make sure that that data's consistent and it's in line with the things that you say are specific to your environment, your local sites or your contracts. We've got to enable that partner integration.

So the only way to do this is for us to actually work with the facilities management software vendors. And I'm very pleased to say we have a very serious mechanism in place now that's been embraced by that industry. And Guy will touch upon that later. We're introducing to you that partnership, but you as customers have these systems in place in your organisation, and we need to make it as easy as possible for those systems to ingest and constantly update the content that's coming from SFG20 that you subscribe to.

Part of that is two-way data communication, and we can have a look at that a bit later. But what we're really looking at doing is sharing data within those systems and having some feedback so that we can continue to improve your experience of SFG20 content based on what's actually happening in your sites and your locations.

So we'll be touching on some of that in a minute. So first of all, we set out some key deliverables for this project, and one of them was to only output concise operational data. Now by that we're looking at, when we're providing information to a CAFM system, we need to make sure that we're not overwhelming them with information that isn't pertinent to their operation.

I think in the past, it's fair to say SFG20 being a, starting as a book and then moving into the PDF world meant that there was a lot of text in one field, for example. So we're passing over that data and the CMMS systems being, having to break that down on a manual basis in order to make it make sense under their own determining field structures.

And of course, when I mentioned earlier that all CMMS systems are different, you can guarantee that the hierarchy of a CMMS system, be that from their locational information into the asset information, can be very different. I mean, we may be faced with limitations of field sizes, 256 characters. We know when the engineer takes on that data on a mobile solution, again, it's a reduced data set, but are we making sure that the pertinent information is feeding through to those CAFM systems or is it being truncated?

And so it was down to us to actually say, okay, here's the schedules. How do we make this more suitable for consumption into those downstream systems? And that's exactly what we've done. So we've looked at breaking everything down into individual steps. So they get passed across to the CMMS system, so the CMMS system can bring them in into individual lines of text or field or however they're structured, rather than just presenting them with a large blob of data that they have to work out how they deal with this.

What we're trying to do is really encourage that constant update and feedback into those systems. Now we're not talking just schedules. Now, the vision of SFG20 is also to help with the mapping moving forwards, and that's mapping from asset to a schedule and identifying that through maybe NRM3 or maybe UNICLASS or maybe even your own form of classification management.

And we want to make that as easy as possible, again, to bring through into those systems, but also contain additional information that may be useful to set up your system. So that might be, for example, if you feed in an asset register, we output the asset register, but the asset register also contains that important SFG20 mapping for those CAFM systems.

I just want to reiterate, there is no way, there's not any intention at all from SFG20 to replace those CMMS systems. They're all excellent operational tools for your organisations. What SFG20's looking to do is help out on those elements that may be challenging at the moment and potentially cause delays in projects such as the mapping of SFG20 to your asset register. Where we can help on that and complement the functionality of the CAFM system and speed up that phase of implementation, that's where we're looking to help.

The data we're passing across also allows the CAFM systems to query what it is they actually want for their individual systems. And this is where I was talking about those differences that they contain. Now the CAFM system can ask for the data to be presented to them in different ways. So it really helps them taking that data on and using that within their product.

The key thing here though is actually not overwhelming, and I think the original SFG20 API system generally passed over everything to a CAFM system, and again, it was up to the CAFM companies to work out how to deal with that. What we are interested in now is only providing them with the data that they need that's pertinent to their operational delivery, but also is relevant to what they're actually doing, and for example, changes that have been made since the previous state. So we're always feeding them those bite-sized chunks of information rather than the whole set of content.

We're also looking at some complementary functions. Some that I mentioned earlier in terms of that feedback and the feedback from the CAFM system into your SFG20 schedules, we're looking to really enhance that content. So that might be completion info that tasks have been completed, but just as pertinent is the actual ability to bring back operational data in terms of this task has taken this long, and what we're looking to do with that data for you is improve your stats around the actual timings of a schedule.

So if a schedule says it should take four hours, but we're receiving feedback from your engineers on using their mobile devices and that data coming into the CMMS system, we can now adjust those accordingly through a gated process, of course, to make sure you're still in control. But now maybe your planners will be looking at a two-hour task rather than a four-hour task, which makes everything far more efficient.

We also have the ability that now we're actually saying to the CAFM systems: here is your data, here is the data that's pertinent to you. We still need it to be made possible for the engineer or a user to be able to access the full SFG20 content. Maybe that's the information around legislation or maybe that's some extra information in terms of the introduction to a schedule, and that can be achieved through providing the CMMS systems with links.

So within their product, they can have the link. It drives back, drives the end user back into the actual Facilities-iQ app, so that they're able to then view the full schedule themselves. So we're not overburdening the CAFM systems, but we're still providing that ability to view the schedule through the data that's provided to CAFM so that everyone can achieve compliance.

Now just going onto the ecosystem of all of this, you can see a very busy slide here with lots going on. What we're trying to do really is explain how everything connects. So you can see on the left, this is where we're talking about schedule mapping. So we're taking asset registers or perhaps even a locational database and actually saying, okay, how does this map to our SFG20 schedule? We're looking at doing that in a very expedient way to enable yourselves to bring data into your systems very quickly, and most importantly, you then keep them up to date.

So we're fed in by the maintenance regimes and custom schedules that you have the ability to produce. So you are making content very relevant and available to your individual sites or contracts. We also have the constant updates that are feeding into SFG20 and where we're doing those updates and those updates are happening.

It's very important that through Facilities-iQ, you're able to see those side-by-side comparisons to understand what's changed, be informed of those decisions where maybe a timing's increased because of a change in legislation or maybe a red task has been declassified to an amber or maybe an additional red task has been added because of the new legislation.

We're making that available to you so you can make those key decisions and then release them into your operational CAFM systems. And that's where we're seeing that data flow back and generally improve the quality of the output of your content.