FEATURE
WHERE CAN (AND SHOULD) TECH TAKE US?
Rising client expectations, remote site monitoring and decreased on-site populations, in addition to growing safety pandemic protocols, means demands on FM are peaking. Here, SafetyCulture explores the growing role of technology in the sector.
It’s 4pm when security takes another round of the premises, but they fail to clock the temperature warning on the internal freezer. There’s been an electrical fault and the backup generator hasn’t kicked in.
Thanks to lockdown, the normal population of staff aren’t on-site and regular checks are being missed. It’s not security’s job, but they’re our only eyes on the ground so it’s defaulted to their remit to spot things that go awry. They’re not properly trained and they don’t know what to look for. For management, there’s no way of seeing what’s happening from afar.
By 5pm the temperature has fallen out of range and all stock is lost. To top it off, there’s leakage and potential water damage to follow.
It’s just one of many potential scenarios that can prove costly to both client and facility, and it’s a risk we’re seeing increase in the current climate. Getting real-time visibility and monitoring from afar is a growing challenge for the sector, and a pain point that’s being felt even more acutely with less people on the ground.
Couple this with increasing demand for accountability from clients and the growing pressures resulting from the pandemic, and it’s clear FM must up its game to not only survive, but thrive in 2021. Is tech the answer?
38 | TOMORROW’S FM Our facilities are talking -
are we listening? Remote monitoring solutions, sensor technology, HVAC and fire suppression systems, equipment monitoring and digital inventory management: we’re already seeing adoption of digital solutions at scale. IoT technology also continues to advance. The trouble lies with getting visibility of, and making sense of, all the data coming from those solutions.
Customers tell us the pain of ‘all the data with no place to flow’ continues to be an untapped opportunity in FM. It’s exacerbated by managing multiple client contracts, each with their own unique systems, platforms and tools: so even if data does ‘flow’, there are often risky delays and it’s far from streamlined.
Once we have that information in our hands, there’s still the struggle to turn those excel spreadsheets into something meaningful that can drive decision- making. Getting a complete real-time picture of all that information still feels, for many, like a far-off utopia.
But the industry is catching on. An emphasis on ‘playing nice’ between different systems has seen new integration functionality rolling out across all areas;
twitter.com/TomorrowsFM
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