The world of work is evolving, with smart functionalities topping the agenda of FM strategies that will truly meet the business needs of tomorrow. Offices are a vital part of this new work reality: how often we use them, how we interact with them and what we expect them to deliver.
How can you shift your FM reality to one that’s equipped to meet the needs – and expectations – of the workforce of the future? The first step is taking stock of your FM scenario as things stand. Then, it’s time for revolution on the office floor.
Is your Facility Management falling behind?
The offices that your business needs are facilities that add value beyond their physical structure, rather than being a funding black hole. Facilities that act as connected hubs, PR pieces and productivity motivators all in one, rather than just the downtrodden embodiment of the daily grind.
They’re smart offices, with data-driven connected systems that can pre-empt your employees’ needs and wants. They’re streamlined facilities that surpass your sustainability targets by optimising lighting, heating, cooling, water usage and catering orders. No more brazenly fully-lit rooms with no one in them. No more perfectly good fresh food discarded because the number of people in the building for lunch was overestimated.
While your intuitive Facility Management is saving the planet, it’ll also be significantly cutting your costs. With the ability to map out the exact amenities and catering you need to meet your employees’ requirements, you’ll never overspend again. Smart lighting and climate control will kick into action precisely when it’s needed. Intelligent booking hubs will optimise capacity and availability to ensure maximum productive meetings, in minimum square footage.
Think of the sense of satisfaction you can weave into your employees’ day to day with guaranteed parking spaces to suit their unique schedule and intuitive catering that hits the spot every time.
For your employees, smart Facility Management is integral to satisfaction and wellbeing (which, in turn, is crucial to productivity). But while they benefit from the surface changes, the true revolutionary undercurrents are reserved for FM insiders’ eyes only: streamlined costs, sustainability game-changers and automation nirvana.
With data as the baseline, your FM options are limitless
Your entire revolutionised Facility Management ecosystem comes down to one little word: data. Data leads to insights, leads to optimised automation.
Data is what will tell you when, where and in what way your lighting, heating and cooling are needed. Data will inform optimised catering, as-needed cleaning and predictive, cost-cutting, time-saving maintenance, from your lifts to your light bulbs.
Data adds licence plate recognition to your visitor check-in procedure, automating visitor arrival notifications and seamless entry for your guests. Data gives your FM the power to auto-release employee’s reservations as soon as they call in sick, optimising availability for the rest of the day.
Data is what will eliminate the human error from scheduling, blocking out parking spaces, work stations and meeting rooms to Tetris-grade perfection. It’s what will automate all your office functionalities so that they know what settings, amenities and configurations your employees need before they’ve even computed it themselves.
The human touch is great for many things, but we all know we’re vulnerable to error. Data just tells it like it is and gets the job done right first time.
FM, it’s time to get smart
It’s unlikely you’re there yet, but these tides of change will wait for no legacy Facility Management operation. To future-proof your facilities, strategising your FM revolution is crucial. So, how can you turn the pipe dream into a workable reality?
Fundamentally, we’ve come to the end of a manual approach’s useful lifespan. The decades-old, legacy systems that your FM runs on are simply out of touch. They waste energy, they don’t measure accurately and they certainly can’t predict what’s coming next. To make the move to data-driven, you need a two-pronged modernisation that encompasses both hardware and software.
Sensors for intelligent climate control, cameras for number plate recognition, biometric readers for facial and fingerprint recognition are the surface tools you might need, but the underlying software is what will power your smart office. An outdated, dispersed software landscape won’t be able to harness, process and usefully channel your data into the actionable results you need to see.
Instead, you need an integrated software platform that pulls data from across your company into a single, easy-to-use interface. Having all your FM data assets accessible via one streamlined, intuitive tool is the crucial launchpad you need to make your target FM scenario a reality.
Keen to stay at the cutting edge with data-driven Facility Management?
We’ve devised an essential checklist to pinpoint where you can modernise your Facility Management (while cutting costs, lowering your company’s carbon footprint and boosting employee satisfaction and productivity, too).
Gain insights into your key areas for improvement and lay the groundwork for your FM revolution in just a few clicks!
