Technical facility management: challenges and outsourcing strategies

Author: Sebastian Bohn, Senior Consultant at Orianda Solutions AG – a valantic company

Find out why facility management, especially Technical Facility Management (TFM), is placing increasingly complex demands on owners and why specialized expertise in maintenance and repair is essential.

Facility management – a term that everyone has heard at some point and which can be applied to both the private and commercial sectors. Owners of land, apartments and/or houses will be familiar with the challenges of facility management, even if they have not yet thought about the generalization and the term.

A growing company with more and more technically sophisticated assets faces increasingly complicated management tasks. This is especially true in the area of Technical Facility Management (hereafter TFM), which deals with the building and its associated technical equipment.

For example, the technical systems generally have a different, usually shorter life cycle than the building itself. This means that owners have to deal with the issues of “conversion, refurbishment and renovation” and “maintenance, repair and replacement” several times during the building’s life cycle.

In addition, some tasks require special qualifications, such as the legally compliant maintenance of ventilation systems or special requirements in the pharmaceutical sector. Owners or their service personnel do not always have these qualifications.

Another issue concerns capacity bottlenecks. In practice, capacity requirements do not remain constant over time, especially with regard to the qualifications required in TFM and the associated additional costs.

Outsourcing in Technical Facility Management – solutions and new challenges

The trend in TFM is moving towards outsourcing, not least for the reasons mentioned above. In general, the aim is to achieve the greatest possible cost efficiency in TFM, which is to be achieved in many areas by using external service providers. Although this solves most of the problems mentioned above, it also creates new ones.

For example, the administrative workload increases in areas such as quality and execution control, the coordination of external employees, including ensuring the accessibility of facilities.

Companies whose assets are spread over a large area, such as a retail company with many sales outlets, face particular challenges in this regard. For FM services, framework supply contracts are usually agreed with local service providers, which have to be managed.

Another critical point is the handling of spare parts and consumables. The question arises as to whether the service provider has access to its own or the customer’s own warehouse and how the integration and updating of data is ensured. Data protection aspects must also be taken into account, as must the efficient commissioning and monitoring of the service provider in order to ensure fair billing.

Data challenges begin as early as the planning phase of a building and its technical assets. The planning and construction phase is becoming increasingly digitized and implemented with the help of the “Building Information Modeling” (BIM) working method. The aim is to be able to use and manage the valuable building data generated in this process as effectively as possible during the operating phase. This significantly increases the demands on the building operator’s IT infrastructure. The aim is to import this “digital building twin”, use the information for an efficient operating phase and keep the data up to date during the operating phase.

A high-performance IT system landscape is key

In addition to this master data, it is also essential to manage transaction data such as fault reports, maintenance and inspection orders and work reports in the IT systems and to integrate the often numerous FM service providers. In this context, a wide range of challenges for the IT systems must be overcome.

This requires the development of a future-oriented and efficient IT system landscape and the clarification of a wide range of questions:

• Should the service provider be given access to the client’s systems and, if so, what data protection issues need to be considered?
• What information and evidence is the building operator responsible for and does it have to document this in its own systems?
• What degree of data sovereignty is the building operator seeking?
• How can he organize his IT system landscape and data in such a way that he does not become too dependent on a service provider?
• How can the client implement efficient execution control using digital options?
• How can the client ensure that activities are carried out at the required time?
• And how can the service provider be commissioned as efficiently as possible, how can its performance be monitored in terms of quality and quantity and how can performance-based billing be guaranteed?

It is crucial to do justice to the different interests of client and contractor.

The right IT support is decisive

The above questions make it clear that facility management is increasingly confronted with challenges in terms of technical complexity and higher qualification requirements, which are particularly relevant for extensive or technically advanced properties.

While outsourcing is gaining popularity as a solution to these problems, it comes with its own challenges, including increased administrative costs and the need for stringent quality control.

In addition, digitization, especially through the use of Building Information Modeling (BIM), increases the demands on the IT infrastructure of building operators, which must ensure the efficient use and maintenance of data. It is clear that, in addition to selecting a suitable FM strategy, the right IT support is also crucial in order to fully exploit the benefits of outsourcing.

For all customers who already use SAP ERP systems to manage their core processes, it is important to review the tools offered by SAP and integrate them efficiently into the existing IT landscape. Particular attention should be paid to the following solution components:

• Real Estate Flexible Management (RE-FX): This component focuses on the commercial management of real estate with processes in the areas of letting, ancillary cost accounting and contracts.
• Enterprise Asset Management (EAM): The core processes in this component are troubleshooting, repair and maintenance processes.
• Business Network Asset Collaboration (BNAC): A cloud-based platform that enables collaboration between operators, manufacturers, service providers and suppliers.

When talking about IT solutions these days, the term artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be ignored. The potential areas of application for AI are wide-ranging. With its integration, the degree of IT support and automation can be significantly increased, thus achieving a decisive competitive advantage. It can facilitate data management and data exchange, translate information from unstructured documents and emails into analyzable data or revolutionize the usability of the system.

For example, in a current customer project, contract documents are converted into structured SAP data, which makes it possible to automatically determine the appropriate service provider for a specific requirement (maintenance, repair, malfunction) for a specific system in a specific building at a specific location, which is contractually conditioned for this situation.

In terms of usability, SAP offers its integrated AI assistant “Joule”. This assistant can be used to ask questions or describe problems to the SAP system in natural language. Answers are generated taking into account the individual context based on business data from the entire SAP portfolio and third-party sources.

Reduce the amount of training required by enabling users to use the system intuitively. Maintenance requirements can be created in natural language (“The fire alarm system in the basement of building 10 is in fault mode 6”). Find the system with the highest costs of unplanned outages without advanced knowledge of the data structure (“Show me the top 10 systems in the Zurich area with the highest fault costs”). Store information from coordination with the service provider (“The company Schindler is coming on November 29 at 9 a.m. to carry out elevator maintenance in building 10”). The list of use cases is immense.

We would be happy to support you in developing the right IT strategy for these tools.