Enterprise scale software platforms: Is your legacy CaFM solution holding you back?

Digital transformation was a long time coming, to the commercial real estate space. Now that it is here, it’s redefining traditional roles and creating unprecedented value, by enabling business models that represent a clear break from the past. Enterprise-wide and centralized software platforms are unifying siloed systems and unlocking unheard of efficiencies. Facilities management (FM) is one aspect of commercial real estate that these solutions have particularly empowered. A significant improvement on those legacy CaFMs that are inflexible and limited, this innovative new generation of solutions is empowering FM providers as primary drivers of multi-faceted value, in the industry.

What’s the most effective route to stealing a march on you competitors in the FM space? Is it offering more value per dollar? Is it being customizable and agile? Is it creating unprecedented efficiencies? What about being future ready and able to respond to emerging opportunities? In a world that settles for nothing less than holistic innovation, which ticks each of those boxes, picking just one of the above is no longer an option.

Traditional CaFM has been an essential service within the commercial real estate space, however it has proved to be inadequate in evolving FM services beyond being a passive cost center. Limited in scope to maintenance, housekeeping and other roles of this nature, legacy FM was restricted to being a secondary business function. While CaFM solutions may have added some process efficiency to this model, they have been unable to redefine it. With the FM provider’s role growing in importance and having significant impact on brand perception, the technology being used needs to evolve and take a proactive role in steering the business. The advent of modern cloud based software platforms, which leverage technology, data, mobility, and real-time decision making, is enabling FM providers to take centrestage and assume the role of one of the most proactive enablers of value, in commercial real estate.

Facilio’s IoT, AI and Machine Learning based solution is built with the vision to empower FM teams and create system wide transparency for all stakeholders. The resulting portfolio-wide optimization has already been adopted by half a dozen or more of the most significant players in FM, and the scale of such deployments are an unambiguous statement about the advantages being realized.  

A giant leap forward

The ability to operate facilities in a proactive manner, by generating real-time responses and actionable insights to drive operations, alters commercial real estate in a very fundamental way. Built assets are unique creations, each with their own advantages and challenges. The new enterprise scale software platform model of FM services allows buildings to address their entire range of desirable outcomes at the same time and on a continuous basis. FM service providers can create these outcomes across an entire portfolio, no matter how geographically diverse the locations involved. In fact, the cumulative advantages are even more advantageous, the larger the scale of deployment is.

Automation and mechanized systems have been part of buildings for decades. However, legacy CaFM is unable to alter the fact that these assets operate in soiled isolation. Consequently, it cannot transform resource utilization profiles, generate maximum efficiencies, or customize these outcomes optimally. The proactive model of FM services that a centralized platform enables is a sea-change that redefines the role of the function within the industry. It unlocks massive value that was previously inaccessible. The fundamental operational advantages an IoT, AI and Machine Learning driven model of FM delivers, over the limited functionality of legacy CaFM, includes:

   Total System Integration: Enterprise scale software platforms allow all mechanized assets and operational teams to work in tandem, allowing all influences and parameters to be leveraged in a synchronized manner.

     Continuous Real Time Optimization: The ability to generate actionable insights in real time creates an agile and responsive model that generates continuous, real-time optimization of the entire operation.

     Unprecedented Sustainability: Being able to extract maximum benefit from resources, as well as enable targeted use of assets that consume energy, dramatically reduces the consumption profile of a building portfolio. 

     Enhanced Workforce KPIs: Workforces are another operational aspect transformed by portfolio wide real time transparency. Monitoring the quality of outcomes, streamlining resource allocation and eliminating superfluous deployment add up quickly, at scale.

     Delightful occupant experiences: Like every other service oriented industry, modern commercial real estate is also defined by the customer experiences it is able to deliver. Software platforms are able to collate operational data in real-time, identify usage patterns and occupant preferences, and deliver high quality occupant experiences.

     Rise in perceived property value: Enterprise scale centralized platforms not only lower operating costs, they concurrently raise the bar on performance, elevating the perceived value of a building and brand. Commercial real estate is a highly sentiment driven business, and consistent quality drives preferential selection by tenants and buyers. 

     High occupancy rates: Another related outcome that boosts the bottom-line of a commercial real estate business is high occupancy rates. By creating a significant differentiation in quality, tech-enabled FM takes this metric up several notches as well.

   Openness to easy customization: This new model of technology deployment also empowers businesses that are the end users to leverage their knowledge and expertise, because of the model’s inherent ability to easily integrate customized workflows and insights.

Future-ready and competitive FM

FM service providers and real estate owners have been burdened by traditional CaFM solutions that lack innovation, offer rigid systems, involve high costs and are unable or unwilling to be invested as a hands-on technology partner, in creating the outcomes you aspire to. The FM services market is becoming more receptive than ever before to vendors who are seen as more collaborative, offer future-ready innovation and are driven by the desire to identify real-world needs and champion the cause of FM businesses.

Tech-empowered facilities management is a radical evolution of the function that unlocks the power of the unutilized data your buildings contain. What sets this new model of FM apart is that it reconciles best case scenarios for all stakeholders, all of the time. An era of scalable, all-encompassing and indispensible FM services is here. Can you afford to miss out?   

About the Author

Nivedha Sridhar is a member of the founding team at Facilio Inc., an enterprise-wide facilities O&M software platform provider, headquartered in New York. A young professional who leads the company’s Product, Content and Growth Marketing initiatives, Nivedha is the co-creator of FutureProof, the annual ‘Modern FM Summit’, which features changemakers in commercial real estate and facilities management. For more information please visit: www.facilio.com