Building and Maintenance
Transparency offers a clear advantage PDF Print E-mail
Written by Nigel Fitzhenry, Romec Ltd, 2007   

Nigel Fitzhenry of Romec Ltd Facilities Management discusses the advantages of switching to mobile data systems and how the latest technology enables facilities managers to operate far more efficiently than before.  

How does this evolving communication technology facilitate better customer service?

What are the wider benefits of mobile data systems?

Ask most facilities managers what keeps them awake at night and you'll probably get similar replies from most of them. Things like having a maintenance service that is reliable and responsive, compliance with health and safety, and keeping building occupiers happy are all likely to feature.

Any good FM company will focus on delivering the basic service: making sure the right engineers are in the right place at the right time with the right skills. But delivering the basic service to the agreed standards (or better if possible) is just the beginning. These days, it's more about the things that wrap around the service that really count and that can differentiate a good FM company from an excellent FM company.

Over the past five years or so, technology has come to the fore and FM companies have been looking at how they can harness technology to enhance their service and offer better value to their customers, while increasing their efficiency and effectiveness as a business.

Most FM companies now use a technological solution of some kind to help communicate with workers out in the field but this is still a fairly new phenomenon and many organisations are still discovering how to harness the potential this brings.

Up until the late 1990s and the early part of the new century, most suppliers used a paper-based system of field service reports (FSRs), perhaps coupled with mobile phones, to allow information to flow around the company and to keep track of that jobs had been done and letting engineers where they need to be.

FSRs would be completed by hand by engineers, put in the post and sent to head office where they were manually keyed into the system to allow back-office processes such as invoicing to take place.

In the late 1990s and early into the new century advances in mobile communication systems made viable alternative systems a possibility. The new generation of communication systems, GPRS technology in particular, has allowed FM companies to develop solutions that allow real-time reporting between engineering workforces and helpdesks. Using specially designed laptops or hand-held PDA-style devices, jobs for customers can now be sent direct to engineers whose daily jobs are constantly updated.

While this has meant engineers having to adapt to a new way of working, it means that priorities can be easily juggled so that urgent jobs go to the top of the queue and other, less urgent jobs can be rescheduled. This helps FM companies meet the demands of customers, keeps building users happy and helps achieve service level agreements.

On completion of a job, most customers now have the facility to sign off completion on-screen and the engineer sends back an electronic job sheet, which updates live job management systems.

The benefits of switching have been tremendous. The new systems allow FM companies to operate far more efficiently than before and the reduced reliance on calls to engineers' mobile phones has helped slash mobile phone bills, thereby improving value.

Perhaps most importantly, such systems have given customers better service, as engineers are able to control and plan their working days more efficiently.

The next step - integrating with back-office systems


Just replacing the old system of communicating with engineers through FSRs and mobile phones with the new technology offers some major benefits. But that's just the start. The next step is to look at how the system can be integrated with back-office systems such as purchasing and finance.

Developing the right system means this can be done, creating seamless links between what's happening at the 'coal face' with the back-office systems that lie at the heart of any organisation.

The wider benefits


Mobile data systems have many spin-off benefits, health and safety for example. Engineers can be given access to specific health and safety information for every job they do, taking into account local conditions, as well as more generic risk assessment information. Not only that but systems give engineers the facility to do an on-the-spot risk assessment, sending it electronically for managerial sign-off if required.

This makes sure engineers have all the information they need and leads them through all the right processes for every job to ensure compliance with health and safety.

The customer perspective - clearly better


When demonstrating such systems to potential new customers, one of the things that appeals is the transparency offered by the system. Customers can now log the progress of jobs in real time, either through a call to a national service centre or through a secure area of a website. For facilities managers, this provides a valuable source of information for themselves, the people they report to and their building occupiers.

As well as the track-and-trace facility for live jobs, mobile data systems allow managers and customers to interrogate performance data and produce performance reports based on past performance.

This puts the customer in control, rather than relying on reports produced and presented by the FM supplier. This all underlies the transparency of the system, helping to build trust and a sense of real partnership between supplier and customer.

Knowledge is power


Under the banner of "electronic intelligence", a further spin-off to the system is the ability to collect and collate information on the assets an FM company looks after. Often this can run into tens of thousands of individual pieces of equipment, from boilers and air conditioning units to fire alarm panels and heating systems. Data then can be collected, including records of the lifespan of different pieces of equipment, maintenance costs and schedules, and the failure rates.

All this information is invaluable to FM companies, manufacturers and customers. It allows companies to work with customers to provide informed information, based on empirical data, allowing the right decisions to be made when replacing equipment or kitting out new premises. This means customers get the right equipment, not just based on purchase and installation costs but on the full lifecycle costs of equipment.

Internally the system provides FM companies with improved cost control and allocation, allowing individual contracts to be interrogated to make sure that all associated costs are properly attributed. This has the added benefit of allowing companies to look at the individual profitability of contracts. Systems generally give organisations a better view of the how they are operating, allowing better decisions about future direction to be made.

Evolution and revolution


The initial switch from an old system to a new system can be something of a mini-revolution. As well as tackling the technology, one of the biggest hurdles is often the resistance to change that can come from large sections of the workforce. But some of the more exciting and interesting developments happen as systems evolve and their full potential is exploited.

Among the plethora of benefits mobile data systems help realise, transparency between customer and supplier is perhaps one of the most fundamental and powerful. People like to know what's going on and are used to living in an 'information on demand' society. Knowing what's going on and having access to performance information has to be one way of helping facilities managers get a better night's sleep.
 
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