How Industry-Specific Facilities Management Technology Improves Your Service Delivery

What does ‘good’ look like to you? In the context of a contract between a facilities management organisation and its client, the answer can depend on where you’re sitting (or standing, or working).

From an overall contract level, ‘good’ means delivering a specific set of services, to a set standard, within an agreed timeframe and budget. Failure to deliver on time or to the right standard risks damaging the relationship and resulting in a non-renewal. Failure to meet budget results in margin erosion. Taking the position of a facilities management employee, ‘good’ is knowing that you’ve completed the task on time, and to the agreed standard. However, if your instructions are delivered verbally, via email, or on a printed handout, the risk of misunderstanding and failing to meet expectations is high.

With a vast number of moving parts — both human capital and task-related — it only takes one person to forget to empty a bin or a team to arrive at site ten minutes late to undermine your broader contractual ambitions. That’s why a software solution to help service contractors deliver on promises is so important. Here are five scenarios where industry-specific facilities management technology can make sure your definition of ‘good’ is understood and adhered to.

1. Providing consistent direction at scale

If you’re hiring and managing hundreds of people, each one of them needs to know precisely what’s required of them, and when. It’s not enough to pin up a list of tasks and hope that the team will memorise them.

2. Getting new workers up to speed

You want your human effort directed in the right places, not being spent double-checking work. The sooner you can get a new hire delivering value to your organisation, the better.

3. Cross-skilling

To make the most of your workforce, you need to be able to deploy them across multiple parts of a contract. Not only does this create efficiencies, it also provides variety and opportunity which drives employee satisfaction – something that will reduce attrition rates and increase pride in the job.

4. Real-time KPI tracking

When you’re running a large, complex operation, there will be thousands of individual actions that roll up into overall contract success. You need to know immediately when an agreed service line has not been met, giving you the opportunity to fix it before the client even sees it.

5. Auditing

A clear audit trail serves you in three ways:

  1. It allows you to proactively showcase success
  2. It provides a tool with which to address and manage questions about contract performance
  3. It moves service failure conversations from opinion to fact-based