TECHNOLO
LOGY, AI & ROBOTICS
ESCAPING THE DOOM LOOP
Jason Petsch, CEO of OUTCO, discusses how technology is bringing long-term thinking back to asset maintenance.
From being an occasional menace, potholes are now ubiquitous on the country’s roads. Indeed, cratered road surfaces are becoming a symbol for national decline. Growing public outrage forced the former prime minister Rishi Sunak to commit a staggering £8bn of the money saved from cancelling HS2 to road repairs - a pledge that laid bare the sheer scale of the problem. According to some figures 2022 saw 1.4 million potholes repaired at a cost of £93.7m. Even so, this spend had fallen short of what was needed as, in the same year, some £22.7m was spent on compensation to motorists.
Beyond the hazard facing road users, there’s a reason the pothole became a large enough bear trap for a PM to avoid. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) the UK has under-invested in infrastructure by half a trillion pounds. Leave aside HS2, this is enough to fund 30 Elizabeth lines and has left the UK in a ‘growth doom-loop’ scrambling to rebuild. According to the IPPR, a mindset of investment-phobia has the UK languishing below the G8 average and ill-equipped to meet challenges such as climate change.
Yet this isn’t just a public sector story. In the world of facilities management, we’re seeing the very same picture play out on many commercial properties and outdoor estates. The underinvestment in maintenance can be seen to produce worse business outcomes. Ageing infrastructure, collapsing fences, and crumbling, pothole- ridden car parks as a result of reduced expenditure – we can see how inadequate investment in ongoing maintenance creates its own doom loop: customers start to go elsewhere, tenants move out, the retail park, high street or commercial property dies a death. Over time, the private sector’s own investment-phobia is producing the same sense of decline and reduced productivity.
Obviously, no organisation deliberately sets out to terminally underinvest. There are three interconnected
22 | TOMORROW’S FM
reasons; the first is when the approach to maintenance gets stuck in set ways and simply repeats what has always been done without adapting the specification for maintenance to changing needs.
The second factor is the focus on the wrong incentives to procurement departments: these have historically been rewarded for delivering year on year on savings without considering the broader long-term impacts.
The third and most important factor is the way that organisations have outsourced property and facilities maintenance services. While outsourcing to specialists delivers real efficiencies, parcelling out maintenance to multiple third parties can eventually erode an
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