Understanding your food, exercise, and sleep patterns is essential to keeping your body fit. Similarly, understanding performance, maintenance needs, and operational costs is essential to keeping your building performing efficiently.

If a personal fitness tracker could also automatically adjust your eating habits, exercise routines, and sleep timings based on your body’s current condition and long-term goals, it would be a technology equivalent to a Computer Aided Facility Management (CaFM) software for facilities management (FM).

Often, commercial real estate (CRE) owners outsource CaFM procurement and management to FM service vendors, who as for-profit businesses, focus more on contract terms over the holistic wellness of your facility.

In a constantly changing business environment with evolving standards for maintenance and operations, CRE owners have started questioning whether outsourcing CaFM is a good idea. There is now more awareness about how this limits them from tapping into the full potential of a CaFM platform which can empower owners to make data-backed operational decisions and build better service offerings for customers/tenants.

Why do CRE owners outsource CaFM?

A few different reasons why CRE owners decide to outsource CaFM are:

1. To free up time for in-house operations teams, primarily if they're already spread thin or while expanding business in other regions.
2. To benefit from the expertise of FM professionals and save time on training employees in-house.
3. To benefit from specific services like hot desking, office hoteling, janitorial services, and more.
4. Additionally, facility management services have access to many resources and best practices built over time to help optimize FM costs.

What are the downsides to outsourcing CaFM?

Recent surveys show that nearly 50% of facility managers managing traditional outsourced contracts are unhappy with the performance, are unable to correct it, and bring FM back in-house in the first two years.

Here are some common reasons why outsourcing CaFM to multiple service providers can actually backfire:

1. Assets far outlive vendor contracts
   Vendor contracts are seldom as long as asset lifetimes. While it may be convenient to pawn off asset management to a vendor initially, what happens when the contract ends or you want to switch vendors?
2. You lose all your data and reports.
3. Clearly, in the long run, outsourcing CaFM data and operations to multiple external vendors proves counterproductive.

Buyers and FM service providers don't follow the same processes

FM service companies already have a way of doing things and the best practices they've established over the years. An FM manager, however, sets the process in alignment with her specific organization's goals, which the service provider is legally obligated to follow.

When you split the difference, more often than not, the result is poor performance.

Switching vendors is tedious if not impossible

As a result of process conflict, and sometimes, the contractor not seeing eye-to-eye with your service standards, you end up with a poorly performing, expensive portfolio of buildings and assets.

If you decide to switch, you are forced to give up on all your CaFM data and reports, and start all over again with your new vendor.

However, each party in such a collaboration is looking out for their interests (cost savings, hassle-free operations for business, and higher profits for the contract), the meaning of a successful partnership may be reduced to how much each party is willing to compromise to meet halfway.

Lack of access to real-time data and operational insights

As you hand over control of your CaFM to external service providers, you also lose valuable data insights that could help improve overall operational efficiency.

Think about it.

An external organization will focus on the contract instead of on your facility's overall efficiency. Unfortunately, this means many issues in the facility not baked into the contract may go unnoticed, collecting hidden costs and inefficiencies.

Further, not owning historical performance data becomes a massive problem during vendor/contractor reviews and negotiations. Same for building and asset optimization - without historical data and reports, you have to start from the scratch with every new vendor.

Next, if you work with multiple vendors across locations or for specific expertise, you're bound to end up with data silos, handicapping your portfolio from realizing its full potential.

In most cases today, the disadvantages of outsourcing CaFM to multiple external vendors outweigh the benefits. So, CRE owners are looking at the bigger picture and taking back control of their data, processes, and facility success.

Why should CRE owners own their CaFM and take back control of their data?

CRE owners have been questioning the effectiveness of not just outsourced FM but also the capabilities of legacy CaFM software, which have traditionally been record keeping tools, and don’t cut it anymore. The post-pandemic world expects more from each facility.

Be it office hoteling, hotdesking, regular sanitization of spaces, or room temperatures that adjust as per weather conditions at all times, CRE owners are turning to modern CaFM to deliver comfortable, safe, and efficient spaces with real-time support for their tenants/occupants.

CRE owners are increasingly making direct investments in technology to stay on top of their facility performance and not depend on external vendors/contractors or the reports they provide.

Here are a few direct benefits of owning your CaFM software:

Gain real-time visibility into 360° portfolio performance

CaFM software becomes the administrative control center to eliminate data silos and enable multi-portfolio management.

It allows FM teams to track asset life cycles, record maintenance histories, evaluate work order data, create project benchmarks, and record real-time performance from one place, and in real-time.

Get to the bottom of service quality

Providing a hyper-personalized, branded experience to each client is crucial to improving relationships and consequently preventing churn. CaFM empowers you to deliver the best customer experience through interactive, service-aware operations.

Whether it is amenities booking or reimbursement requests, give your customers a way to access the services they need from a single point. Allow them to raise work orders, access omnichannel support, and track progress on their service requests in real time.

Create customized routines and workflows, and organize tenant information in easy-to-view and up-to-date lists.

Leverage mobile-first operations

Most modern CaFM vendors offer a mobile application that allows technicians to access the information they need while on the job, even when there's no internet.

Mobile access also helps field operators respond rapidly, promoting real-time reporting, ensuring data integrity, boosting customer experience, and saving costs.

Back your every decision with real-time data

CaFM software connects people, processes, and systems in a meaningful way to deliver real-time and comprehensive data analytics and insights, enabling FM teams to make data-driven decisions.

CaFM systems can now leverage IoT devices to enable real-time visual data sets, customizable for different properties and views. Imagine boardroom conversations with various stakeholders and management with real-time data to support your every decision!

Forge lasting relationships with your best vendors

Incorporating vendor/contractor data into your CaFM allows you to seamlessly share asset documents, monitor service-level agreements (SLAs), and even store ratings.

A consolidated portal allows your contractors to update the status of their digital tasks and work orders through these tools. This means you get updated information while also benefiting from streamlined insights into your contractors' performance.

Make your CaFM work for you

CaFM software forms the operational cornerstone for every building portfolio and houses valuable data insights to improve business outcomes. Top O&M (operation and maintenance) leaders recommend owning CaFM from the beginning of an asset’s lifecycle to ensure efficiency, now and in the future. Done right, CaFM can be instrumental in driving digital transformation initiatives for commercial building facilities.

Owning CaFM enables businesses to gather and visualize data from across the portfolio in various contexts, empowering them with real-time insights to improve operational performance and deliver delightful customer experiences continually. 

This article was authored by Prabhu Ramachandran, Co-founder & CEO of Facilio, as part of the 'Expert Talk' series. CMtoday’s ‘Expert Talk’ series carries knowledge pieces every week by industry professionals who give their take on the key trends, observations, issues, and challenges in the built environment. The opinions in these articles are the author's own and do not reflect that of CMtoday. This is a standard disclaimer.