Digitalization of Facility Management, where do we stand?

Employee well-being, reduction of expenses related to the operation of buildings, better building management, how does the digitalization of Facility Management become a vector of value and attractiveness?

The organization and management of workspaces, better known under the name of” Facility Management ” (FM), have long been considered a burden for businesses. However, we are now seeing an evolution of associated jobs, so that Facility Management becomes a lever for creating value, meeting both cost reduction objectives and the expectations of employees concerning their workplace. In order to highlight the areas of evolution in the field and the levers for creating value, we interviewed around twenty professionals, Facility Management consultants, facility managers in the industrial sector and in office real estate (Schneider Electric, STMicroelectronics, HP, Schneider Electric, STMicroelectronics, HP, HP, Biomérieux, CBRE, Crédit Agricole, etc.). Working environment, new technologies, and new responsibilities, we provide you with a summary of these interviews.

Facility Management jobs, a continuous adaptation to building occupants

Well-being at work, adapting space to constantly changing business needs and processes, optimizing energy and maintenance expenses, the facility manager is at the heart of these challenges and plays a key role in the company. Formerly known as General Services Manager, we are seeing the disappearance of this term in favor of that of” Facility manager ”, in line with the evolution of this profession, which has gone from a building orientation to a building occupant orientation.

Moreover, this formula would already disappear in the English language, to make way for”office manager”, as Frans Van Eersel states in his article” 4 Reasons Why Facility Management Is Dead ”, with the profession increasingly tending to focus on the management and evolution of the workspace over time, according to the expectations of employees and the company.

The work environment, a strategic lever for attractiveness and competitiveness

The work environment is now an important factor in the well-being of employees. It contributes to the motivation of employees and the encouragement of future employees to join the company. It must therefore first of all be in line with the needs of each of the professions represented, but also a reflection of the corporate culture. Environmental awareness, modernity, comfort, employee experience, employee experience, employee expectations are changing, the responsibilities of the facility manager must also evolve. For example, it should be noted that 47% of employees expect regulations concerning the environmental impact of work buildings by 2020 (source: ISS 2020 Vision - New ways of working, the workplace of the future).

Thus, the facility manager must now collaborate closely with the company's CSR department. Being both as close as possible to employees and field teams, the merger of these two departments will make it possible to:

• Create a synergy between business needs, and an approach aimed at improving the well-being of employees in order to better adapt the space to their needs;
• Define common objectives for the modernization of the building, in order to reduce its ecological impact;
• Collaborate on projects aimed at achieving certain standards and labels related to the energy performance of buildings.

IoT and Big Data, a lever for” Facility Optimization Management ”

Whether on an industrial site, in a tertiary building, or in hospitals, Facility Management is increasingly oriented towards the exploitation of building data.

This approach allows facility managers to extend their field of action in optimizing building management expenses, mainly on energy and maintenance aspects, while relieving field teams through automatic reporting of building data.

Thanks to the diversity of IoT solutions offered on the market, facility managers benefit from instant, recurring and broader reporting of building data. Multiple uses result from it:

• The automatic measurement and regulation of heating, air conditioning, water and electricity consumption, making it possible to reduce energy bills.
• Measuring the real occupancy rate of building spaces, in order to understand their use and optimize maintenance and soft services
• Predictive maintenance, thanks to the prediction of breakdowns and the detection of operating anomalies, also makes it possible to extend the life of equipment.
• Geolocation, in particular with regard to valuable equipment on the site, or maintenance intervention areas.

Overall, the use of this data allows the facility manager to take a preventive approach. As Apolline Perez (Facility Management Pilot Expert at DOSIM):” With this data, facility managers are in a position to improve maintenance or maintenance intervention times, to anticipate malfunctions and to optimize the building's energy consumption, allowing them to further reduce costs. ”.

Thus, facility managers can now activate new levers for optimizing expenses, while meeting the needs of occupants, whether in terms of comfort or business needs.

Digital twin, the advantage of large-scale Facility Management

Using a digital twin, in the form of a BIM model or virtual navigation, now allows facility managers, maintenance managers or site managers to supervise various buildings without going to site.

For example, the association of a CMMS tool with a BIM model allows remote site management, in particular through the visualization of the 3D model of the building and its components. The interface between these two tools allows the various maintenance operations to be reported in the BIM model. This use is all the more relevant for Facility Management companies, as Franck Gilly (facility manager at Engie Cofely) because “it will make it possible to connect all the sensors of our customers' buildings to the BIM model to have a real-time and remote visualization of their entire fleet”. This data may also be available to all other building stakeholders: operators, owners, subcontractors, etc.

However, one of the main challenges in order to fully optimize the exploitation of the BIM model during the operation phase is to keep the data constantly updated so that the information shared is not erroneous. This difficulty, combined with the complexity of implementing BIM (costs, tools, processes, etc.), means that the adoption of these technologies by companies is still not very widespread.

In this context, are also developing virtual building visit technologies which first of all allow you to visualize (or have visualized) your speaker remotely. Here, we always talk about 3D through the point cloud without necessarily going to the modeling stage and we superimpose high definition panoramic photos on it. 3D therefore allows access to precise geometric data and the photorealistic virtual tour offers a remote preview that is very useful for managing its operations. Indeed, it offers the possibility for maintainers, service providers and/or building operators to be able to plan an intervention with a common frame of reference without going to the site. The big advantage lies especially in the fact that this data is accessible in the web browser and therefore for all employees authorized to access it, unlike BIM models, which require specific software and machines to handle them. Of course, BIM goes much further in the information and the type of data it embeds, but this option remains an accessible first step (technically and financially) towards the digital twin by already responding to numerous use cases, especially for companies that are still not very advanced in their digital transformation.

A necessary evolution

In conclusion, the digitalization of Facility Management professions allows for a finer optimization of expenses related to building management and an improvement of the employee experience. These two areas of responsibility on which facility managers focus today place them at the heart of financial challenges and strategic attractiveness for companies.

On the other hand, beyond ensuring the management of buildings for employees, facility managers will have to integrate new types of actors into their processes. Indeed, robots, drones and other autonomous vehicles are all new “collaborators” who will interact with the building and the people who will have to be taken into account. They will consume and produce data, make it possible to update what we know about the places, will be involved in maintenance phases and in key company processes such as transport, surveillance, analysis, inventory, etc. To perform their tasks, they will have to rely on up-to-date 3D data (models, plans) to move or locate themselves in space.

The digital twin of buildings will therefore become a support and a resource for facility managers to integrate all facets of their activity, optimize their work and respond to the new challenges of their profession.

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