What is a CAFM system?
CAFM stands for computer-aided facilities management: software that holds asset registers, maintenance schedules, job records and compliance documents for a property portfolio in one place.
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<img src="https://facilityoptix.co.uk/glossary/cafm/diagram.svg" alt="CAFM — diagram from FacilityOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://facilityoptix.co.uk/glossary/cafm">What is a CAFM system?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://facilityoptix.co.uk">FacilityOptix</a>
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</figure>Its purpose is to make the state of a building answerable. Without one, questions like which statutory inspections are overdue across forty properties can only be answered by asking forty people.
The implementations that fail do so on data rather than on software. A system loaded with an inaccurate asset register produces a confident, precise, wrong picture, which is more dangerous than a spreadsheet everyone knows to distrust.
Engineer adoption decides the rest. If work is recorded on paper and typed up later, the system holds a retyped account of the building rather than a record of it, and the timestamps stop meaning anything.
In practice
A system implemented with the previous contractor's data.
Assets, schedules and histories were migrated wholesale, including the gaps and the duplicates.
A CAFM system makes an estate's records visible, which is uncomfortable when the records are poor and is precisely the value.
Implementations fail by trying to clean the data inside the new system instead of before it goes in.
What goes wrong in practice
- Implemented over an unverified asset register, so every downstream output inherits the error.
- Used by the office and not by engineers, producing double entry and delayed records.
- Compliance certificates stored as unsearchable attachments with no expiry tracking.
- Configured to mirror an existing broken process rather than to fix it.