CAFM system: what it does, the Irish records it holds, and how to choose one

01

What a CAFM system is, and the duties behind it

CAFM stands for computer-aided facilities management. A CAFM system, sold by most vendors simply as CAFM software, holds what a facilities manager needs to know about buildings, assets, maintenance and space, and the processes that act on it: taking requests, raising jobs, scheduling planned preventative maintenance (PPM), tracking contractors and reporting on what was done. In Ireland it is used by in-house estates teams in offices, colleges, hospitals and hotels, by FM contractors who run buildings for clients, and by managing agents looking after apartment developments on behalf of an owners' management company (OMC).

No Irish law requires a CAFM system. What the law requires is maintenance, and the ability to show it. Section 8(2)(c) of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 extends an employer's general duty to ensuring, so far as is reasonably practicable, "the design, provision and maintenance" of the place of work "in a condition that is safe and without risk to health", the same for safe means of access and egress, and the same for "plant and machinery or any other articles". Section 8(2)(e) adds systems of work that are "planned, organised, performed, maintained and revised as appropriate".

The duty is not only the employer's. Section 15 applies to a person who has control to any extent of a non-domestic place of work made available to people other than their own employees, and subsection (2) brings in anyone who, by contract, tenancy, licence or other interest, has an obligation to maintain or repair it, to the extent of that obligation. That can reach the landlord of a multi-let office, the OMC responsible for an apartment block's common parts, and the FM contractor whose contract says it maintains the building.

Fire safety has its own duty. Section 18(2) of the Fire Services Act 1981, as substituted by section 29 of the Licensing of Indoor Events Act 2003, requires every person having control over premises to which the section applies to take all reasonable measures to guard against the outbreak of fire, to provide reasonable fire safety measures and procedures, and to "ensure that the fire safety measures and procedures ... are applied at all times". The same 2003 amendment added "any workplace" to the premises the section covers. A CAFM system is one common way of running those duties and producing the evidence when an inspector asks.

02

What a CAFM system covers, and how it differs from a CMMS or IWMS

Products differ, but most are built around the same core. A typical CAFM system offers modules for:

• Asset register: plant, equipment and building elements, with location, condition and maintenance history, from boilers to fire doors and emergency lights.
• Planned preventative maintenance: schedules attached to each asset, with the frequency, the task and who does it.
• Helpdesk and reactive maintenance: requests logged, prioritised and turned into jobs (work orders, in most systems), tracked and closed against the contract's response times.
• Contractor management: approved contractors, their insurance, safety statements, permits to work and performance.
• Compliance: statutory inspections and their due dates, with reports and certificates attached to the asset or building they belong to.
• Space: floor plans, occupancy and space usage, room bookings and moves.
• Reporting: dashboards on work completed, overdue tasks, costs and performance for the management team, the client or the OMC board, so they can monitor operations without asking for a separate report.

The labels overlap, and vendors use them loosely. A CMMS (computerised maintenance management system) is focused on maintenance itself: assets, planned and reactive work, spares and engineers. A CAFM system covers maintenance from the building's point of view and adds the helpdesk, space, compliance and soft services such as cleaning and security. An IWMS (integrated workplace management system) adds leases, portfolio, capital projects and sustainability for a large estate, and is used for longer-term planning across the whole portfolio. None of them is the building management system (BMS), which controls heating, ventilation and lighting in real time; the two can be linked so that a BMS alarm raises a job.

The benefits are practical ones: fewer requests lost in email, statutory tasks that do not slip past their due date, and a record that answers an inspector, a client or an OMC board without a search through old files. Over time the same data gives a view of operations across the estate, which supports strategic decisions about which assets to replace and which contracts to renew.

03

The Irish records a CAFM system is asked to hold

Most of the value of a CAFM system in Ireland lies in the records it keeps against specific duties. The ones that come up most often are these.

• Inspection of work equipment. Regulation 30 of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (General Application) Regulations 2007 (S.I. No. 299 of 2007, as made) requires periodic inspections and, where appropriate, testing of work equipment exposed to conditions that cause deterioration, carried out by a competent person, with the results "recorded and kept available for 5 years from the date of inspection" for an inspector.
• Maintenance of work equipment. Regulation 31 requires work equipment to be kept by adequate maintenance throughout its working life, and "a maintenance log for any machine" to be kept up to date.
• Fire detection and fire-fighting equipment. Regulation 13 of the same Regulations requires it to be "inspected and maintained as frequently as necessary to ensure that it is in good working order" and serviced by a competent person, as the HSA's Guide to the General Application Regulations 2007, Chapter 1 of Part 2: Workplace sets out. The same guide says mechanical ventilation should be maintained in good working order "as part of a plant maintenance system".
• Electrical installations. The HSA's page on inspection and testing of electrical installations quotes Regulation 89 as it now stands: an existing installation is to be tested by a competent person in an appropriate manner "from time to time where required having regard to the nature, location and use of the installation", or if an inspector requires, with a report of the test completed, and all defects found "rectified promptly so as to prevent danger".
• Lifting equipment and lifts. Regulation 52(3) requires work equipment of a type or class listed in Parts B or C of Schedule 1 to be examined by a competent person at least once in the period that Schedule sets, and Regulation 53 requires the competent person to prepare a report of every examination, which is what the system should hold.
• The fire safety register. The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage's Fire Safety Guide for Building Owners and Operators (August 2023) says a fire safety register "should be maintained for all premises where section 18 applies", kept on the premises, kept up to date and available to an authorised officer of the fire authority. See the fire safety register guide.

The fire safety guide describes the register as "a living document – with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual records of fire safety checks of procedures and the life safety systems within the premises", including "details of routine checks, planned inspections and maintenance carried out on fire protection equipment and systems, with comments on the results of the checks and inspections and actions taken (and by whom) to address defects". It also says that faults "are a life safety issue – not simply a maintenance issue to be dealt with later". Its Table 2 sets out a routine maintenance programme against the Irish Standards, among them I.S. 3218 for fire detection and alarm systems, I.S. 3217 for emergency lighting and I.S. 291 for portable extinguishers, and a CAFM system's fire PPM is usually built from it. Legionella control and the checks promised in the safety statement are commonly scheduled in the same system.

04

How to choose a CAFM system

Choosing well starts with your own processes. Write down how requests reach you, who does the work, which statutory tasks you must evidence and to whom you report: a client, a board of management or an OMC board. Then test each system against that.

1. Start with the jobs, not the modules. Name the five or six processes the system must support from day one, usually the helpdesk, jobs, PPM, contractor control and compliance, and judge each product on those.
2. Look at the asset data it needs. A system is only as good as its asset register. Ask how data is imported, how assets are coded and located, and how the register is kept current when things are replaced.
3. Check the phone side. Engineers and contractors must be able to receive, update and close jobs on site, with photos, including in a basement plant room with no signal.
4. Check the Irish compliance content. Ask whether the schedule library reflects the Irish Standards and the fire safety guide's programme, or whether it was written for another country and needs rewriting.
5. Settle the data protection terms. A hosted system will hold names, phone numbers and sometimes residents' details. The Data Protection Commission's guidance on controller and processor relationships explains that a controller engaging a processor must have a legally binding data processing contract under Article 28 of the GDPR, and must use only processors that give sufficient guarantees of appropriate technical and organisational measures.
6. Understand the whole-life cost. Ask for the cost over the contract term, including implementation, data migration, training and extra modules, not the first-year licence.
7. Agree who owns the data. Where an FM contractor or managing agent runs the system, the client or OMC should be able to see the records and take a usable export if the contract ends.

Many contractors run their own CAFM software and report to the client from it, which works if the client can see the underlying data. For an apartment development, the OMC guide covers the split between the company and its managing agent: the board remains responsible even when the agent operates the system.

05

Implementing a CAFM system, and why some disappoint

Most implementations that disappoint do so for reasons that have little to do with the software: an incomplete asset register, schedules copied from an old spreadsheet, a helpdesk bypassed by ringing the engineer people know, and nobody keeping the data current. A sensible implementation runs in stages.

1. Survey and data. Build or verify the asset register by walking the buildings, not only by importing old lists. Record location, type, condition and statutory status for each asset, including the fire doors, emergency lights and call points the fire safety register will need.
2. Schedules. Attach maintenance schedules to assets, separating statutory tasks from discretionary ones, and set frequencies from the relevant standard, the manufacturer's instructions and the competent person's advice.
3. Processes. Agree priorities, response times, who approves work, how a defect found during an inspection becomes a job, and how a job is closed. Write them into the system rather than around it.
4. People. Train engineers, helpdesk staff and contractors, and make the new route the only route for requests.
5. Review. After three to six months, compare what the reports show with what is happening in the buildings, and fix the data where the two disagree.

Two points are specific to Irish practice. First, the safety statement should describe how maintenance and inspection are organised, and once a CAFM system is running, the statement and the system ought to say the same thing. Section 20(5) of the 2005 Act requires the statement to be reviewed where there has been a significant change in the matters to which it refers. Second, the fire safety guide asks for defects to be entered in the register and corrected promptly; a CAFM system that records the contractor's visit but not the follow-up job, or closes the job without saying what was done, leaves exactly the gap the guide is warning about.

The first reports will show gaps. That is the system doing its job: the gaps were there before, simply invisible.

06

Where the record fails, and where SiteClara sits beside a CAFM

A CAFM system is very good at the work it is told about: the engineer's job, the contractor's quarterly visit, the certificate that falls due. It is weaker at the routine work of cleaning, security and caretaking teams, and at the faults they notice on the way. The security officer who finds a fire door wedged open, the caretaker who walks the escape routes every morning: most of that never reaches the helpdesk, or arrives as a vague email with no location. The daily and weekly fire checks the register expects are often a sheet on the back of a door, filled in a week at a time.

SiteClara is not a CAFM system. It sits beside one for those teams. A printed QR poster at each location, with an NFC tag behind it if staff should tap, lets staff scan or tap with their own phone, with no app to install, to complete the scheduled checks due there or explain what stopped them, with a photo when one is asked for. The named person and the time are recorded as it happens. A fault found on a round is reported at that location and stays on the team's list of jobs until someone closes it.

The supervisor sees what was due, done and missed, records the reason a check was missed, and can escalate a job to the building manager, who answers with what happens next and can raise it in the CAFM helpdesk where an engineer is needed. Each day the supervisor reviews and approves a report that goes to nominated management or client contacts the next morning, showing what was reported, completed and still open, and how the scheduled checks went.

07

Further reading, and a list to take away

The 2005 Act and the 2007 Regulations are on the Irish Statute Book, and the Health and Safety Authority publishes a guide to each chapter of the Regulations. For fire, the Department of Housing's Fire Safety Guide for Building Owners and Operators is the natural starting point for a CAFM system's fire PPM. For data protection, start with the Data Protection Commission's guidance on controllers and processors.

Before you buy or replace a CAFM system, check that:

• your asset register has been verified on site, not only imported;
• statutory tasks are separated from discretionary ones;
• the fire safety register can be produced in full on the premises;
• defects found on inspection become jobs, and closed jobs say what was done;
• you have a data processing contract, and the client or OMC can export the records;
• your safety statement describes the regime the system actually runs;
• the routine checks and faults found by cleaning, security and caretaking teams have a route in.