At the recent PropTech Festival by Ventures Connect in Address Hotel Dubai Marina, experts from Dubai's FM industry came together to discuss key trends in digitisation and how they help address the growing demand for improved services.

The panel was moderated by Sarfaraz Dairkee, General Manager, M.A.H.Y. Khoory & Co, and the panelists included Mohamad Abou Laban, CEO, Deyaar Facilities Management; David Nice, Associate Director, Emrill; Javeria Aijaz, Managing Director, HITEK, Senior Director – Technology & Innovation, Farnek; Mazen Yehia, Head Community & Facility Management, Al Mouj, and Tarek Nizameddin, CEO, of AG Facilities. 

According to the panelists, demand for tech in FM is driven by the clients' needs.

"We rely a lot on technology and innovation and it's part of our culture to push ourselves over and to provide our customers with the best systems that make their life easy to enjoy and to do work as well," said Yehia.

Technology is no longer an option for FM providers but an essential need, and hence, investing in technology has become a common practice.

“Digital transformation has helped have eyes, ears, and hands-on all the assets that are there,” said Yehia. "Investing in technology really is not an option. It's existential, and it's not a monetary measure. So we need to keep up. Managing the expectation of the end-user is relying more and more on technology.”

Digitilisation in FM helps streamline processes for both employees and clients.

“Whenever we think about technology, being an FM company, we always segregate people, the facility assets, and the processes. So, when we talk about people, we are talking about our customers as well as our employees. So, whenever we come up with a technology for people, we make sure that it is providing more support to our employees,” said Javeria

However digitization is only useful when technologies are integrated and “are built to talk to one another,” said Laban.

“Technology cannot be isolated. For instance, a time attendance system doesn't make sense if it is not connected to your payroll and you still need to do it through manual intervention,”  said Javeria. 

Technology is constantly changing and it is important that FM providers evolve along with it to reap its benefits.

“It's not only technology, which evolves, the process of doing work should be leaner because "we don't want to stay where we are today. We want to evolve, we want to grow. So our technology and the processes have to be scalable and smarter,” said Javeria.

Some of the main challenges in adopting tech in FM originate from budget constraints and educating clients on how to use them. “The difficulties or the challenges are mostly the budgets, sometimes data and how we can make the customers aware of such technology, so to push them to adopt it,” said Yehia.