The last decade has seen a continuous & rapid growth in home communities, commercial malls and office complexes. This has brought to fore a whole new facilities management (FM) industry. This industry is all set to transform rapidly in the upcoming decade with Covid induced new realities acting as a catalyst, fast tracking the transformation.

The FM industry has been hidden from the limelight, toiling hard to deliver the best with tight budgets. The new realities offer an opportunity for the industry to come to the fore, ONLY IF RESPONDED WELL & IN A TIMELY MANNER.

Here are OPPORTUNITIES (TOPLINE BOOSTERS AND BOTTOMLINE BOOSTERS) for the FM companies to leverage, take a bold and proactive step to move ahead in the growth curve. This can be achieved by taking full advantage of the transformational realities.

TOPLINE BOOSTERS

1. Fast growing health, hygiene and wellness related expenses both at workplace and home clusters (communities).
2. Increased outsource potential as firms move away from managing facilities to focus on their core activities. By 2025, the global outsource market for FM services will be worth $ 1 Trillion. (Source: CBRE)
3. New norms, New workplace, New community demands. FM companies can step out of the current limited boundary of operations to evolve and offer a whole new Experience as a Service (EaaS) that is driven strongly by technology, efficiency, data-insights and customer-happiness.
4. FM companies to look for business adjacencies aimed at greater integration of services such as project services, other transaction services, advisory services, services related to compliance at workplace. This approach can take the burden away from the corporates and workplace owners.
5. New alliances, new long-term collaborative partnerships, new and innovative business models between client and FM partner.

BOTTOMLINE BOOSTERS

1. Leveraging data to create newer service opportunities, playing a greater role of an intelligent and value add partner to the client. Deriving real-time actionable intelligence can help optimize assets, workforce and resources thereby reducing wastage and cost of operation.
2. Technology driven services delivers greater efficiency and drives profit. Examples: Use of Robotics & Automation to carry out routine and hazardous tasks to reduce cost and risk, IOT deployment to enable visibility of applications that will drive data analytics and in turn promote predictive maintenance.
3. Workflow Automation adoption promotes ‘Low-Touch’, ‘No-touch’ boosting customer confidence and trust.
4. Outsource / offshore back-end management to build cost & work efficiency, thereby reducing non project management expenses.
5. Effectively managed Work From Home to bring down rent and infrastructure overhead cost.

FOUNDATIONAL PRIORITIES TO LEVERAGE THE NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Do a Business Health Check as the start point. It is pertinent and crucial to know what weighs the business down under current circumstances and what behavioural patterns need correction.

Keep Employee experience / Community experience as top agenda that organizations and Owners associations will not want to compromise. However, cost of doing so will pose short term hurdles for FM companies. Hence FM companies coming up with commercially innovative and holistic solution will hold the key for the future.

Relook at all operations and replace touch-based services with ‘low-touch’ – ‘no-touch’ approaches. This will provide a competitive edge for newer contracts as well as contracts renewals. Design thinking approaches will play a vital role as it can bring very cost-effective solutions.

Replace reactionary and static approaches and processes with real-time diagnostic and early detection system to stay on top of challenges. All said and done, building maintenance is seen as a real-time operation.

The most important factor that will determine a facilities management company’s resilience and growth is how serious they get to prepare themselves in the upcoming 3 – 6 months’ and put the organization on a path of continuous adaptation.

It is now more or less clear that the COVID uncertainty is here to stay and we need to find ways to cope with it.

In my next article, I shall articulate more on potential threats and how to overcome them.

About the Author

Vasudevan Kidambi is a business (Digital) transformation Coach and leader in helping business recover, in these extraordinary times. He has spearheaded digital first, mobile first solution for global organizations. He has assisted business across multiple industries including facilities management to realign to the new business realities. He also has led transformation assignments for facility management companies towards improved profitability

Using 100% design thinking approach, he has combined data analytics and the art of storytelling into a compelling service – Business Health Check which is crucial for any organization trying to stay relevant in these testing times. He has continuously made himself relevant to key decision makers through powerful posts and articles that changed way leaders think. He is strongly motivated by ancient wisdom and uses that with innovation to solve today’s global crises.