Facility Management Industry covers a broad range of both public and private organisations. Services & products are quite broad. Services range from operational planning to building maintenance. And products range from air conditioners, cleaning products, and environmental performance.
Digital Transformation in the Facility Management industry is not just about technology.
It encourages the organisation to get clear on vision, strategy and new ways of thinking.
It’s about building a long term platform for transforming business processes. Aligning and taking advantage of digital technologies today.
There are many challenges when transforming a company. Yet, as an organisation, you need to get clear on innovation, systems and processes. Not to forget culture.
There are 3 key areas of transformation. These include; employee experience, customer experience, and smart processes. With a focus on how they each integrate.
Facility Management Customer, Stakeholder, and Partner Experience
The FM industry has a lot of external stakeholders. Including partners, customers, who should all be apart of the Digital Transformation Strategy. Think about tenants, suppliers, subcontractors, customers, and property managers. The FMA Annual Report 2017-18 estimates that there are 200,000 people in the industry. Made up of approximately 60% practitioners, 29% suppliers and 11% purchasers.
Through technology, we don’t want to lose the human interaction. Especially between these stakeholders. The aim is to make their lives easier with a seamless customer experience. Yet, to succeed, you need to ensure tight internal processes. This will provide efficient and effective experience for customers, stakeholders, and partners.
Digital Mindset
There are two types of organisations;
- Companies that tweak or replace old systems, without optimisation for results.
- Managers who focus on ROI over time through technology.
To have a digital mindset is not about deploying technologies. In fact, in the beginning, they’re not even thinking about tech.
They’re focused on the customer first.
They’re on the ground speaking to their clients, stakeholders and partners. Researching how they’re currently interacting with the organisation. And asking questions how they want to engage with the organisation.
Mapping out the customer journey
The key is to map out each stakeholder’s journey. Include all steps and processes they are likely to interact with your organisation.
Think about sales, ordering, help desk, procurement, project management, and quality control. Not to mention marketing and finance.
Having related workflows for each department ensures a successful transformation journey. Why? This is the core of any system.
Choosing the right Digital Transformation System
Before replacing your existing intranet, analog records, “siloed” data storage (spreadsheets!). As tempting as it is, don’t start the search for an all-in-one super-powered system.
This won’t fix all your process issues. First, check what current systems are in place. Find out if there’s an API, you can leverage. Think API First.
Then enhance these systems to help you track, understand and respond to vital issues. This will facilitate your Transformation Strategy.
Facility Management Employee Experience
When it comes to investigating the employee experience consider internal challenges. Determine all issues and bottlenecks when it comes to servicing your customers.
At this stage, set the employee mindset for transformation. Get them focused on getting clear on the actual problem. Then workshop how technology might go about fixing the issue.
The biggest tip I can give is to start small. Always bring the problem back to the customer and how it will provide value.
Smart Processes for Facility Management
For the Facility Management Industry, collating data is an integral component. Data in the way of building management systems, GPS tracking on cars and mobile devices.
It’s one thing to collect data, but how can you use this for a competitive advantage? This is where digital transforms your organisation.
Smart Processing Technologies include:
- Cloud software
- Machine learning
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Mobile-first technologies.
Then smart processing leverages predictive models to predict where the next problem may occur. The key is to learn from it, and prevent it.
IoT for Facility Management
IoT is the passing of data between physical devices connected to the internet.
An example are sensors connected to the internet that capture data. This benefits the facility management organisation by identifying potential issues and problems.
