The facilities management industry is rapidly transforming with the rise in awareness and people’s choice of where to work and how their community living space should be. The expectation from the industry to deliver more with less is also felt on the rising pressure on profits.

Working on topline alone for ensuring healthy profits is not enough. To realize healthy profits, every available lever must be engaged to its optimum potential.

The industry, by its nature, is complex due to a vast pool of skilled workers coupled with tens of thousands of work orders every day, making it a transaction heavy industry. Small, yet continuous efficiency improvements, with greater inclusiveness is the key to achieving greater profit. This is in addition to technology deployment.

Here are 10 profit improvement tips for facilities management companies that can help push profits up.

1. Do a proper Business Health Check exercise to know what weighs the organization down
2. Minimize ‘long tail’ syndrome in Receivables & Payables; explore automation for Payables
3. Optimize workforce allocation -to-work order potential, minimize redundancy / replacement
4. Deploy effective engagement strategy to minimise attrition levels and in turn optimize hiring costs
5. Rationalise efforts with earnings (Efforts to Earnings Index) across projects to bring all projects within an operational band
6. Carry out real-time monitoring to control repetitive tasks and enhance efficiency
7. Map on-ground process in line with mutually agreed SLA, to streamline efforts and reduce wastage
8. Conduct a Severity – Magnitude Check on Receivables to assess impact of delays in collection
9. Expense Pattern analysis will help understand behavioural symptoms, which when corrected will increase profits
10. RPO (Revenue, Profits, Outstanding) Matrix will help explore quality of projects and provide insights for corrective action

Every organization has its own distinct profit leaks patterns and a 100% data driven exploratory exercise can help unearth all those that has been weighing the organization down and significantly affecting profits.

In my next article / post I shall articulate ‘what is next’ for FM companies and what kind of preparation will help them stay relevant / resilient.

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.