People and Assets: Humanising Data

Managing buildings and facilities following the COVID-19 crisis presents a new set of challenges for owners and occupiers. Interestingly, the pandemic demonstrated that building and facility management is an essential service that was required throughout the crisis.

The depth and breadth of the economic and operational impact on the building management and operations sector is uncertain, but two clear trends are emerging.  The first is increased work flexibility designed to attract and retain talent. The second trend is accelerated digitisation and reliance on data as enablers of enhanced employee experience, increased cost efficiencies and better risk management.

“The smartest players will understand the changed landscape and alter their strategy to adapt and take the opportunity to deepen their relationships, clients, end-users, investors and vendors.”

Cameron Scott, a globally experienced executive in real estate and facilities management, works with Locatrix as an Advisory Board Member. 

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Locatrix CEO John Hummelstad, recognised the insights that Cameron could provide on how facilities management clients would benefit from adopting the Locatrix indoor mapping platform and tools.  “I wanted to understand the Facilities Management world, what are their problems, their challenges and how are they planning to respond in regard to building compliance, in particular to the older buildings that change over time”.

Already Cameron has provided great insights and is particularly interested in PlanStudio’s ability to create a digital twin as a future service delivery model for facility and property management. 

“Granting more work flexibility to employees - including of course working from home - is resulting in more variability in workplace occupancy across the working week, giving rise to the concept of dynamic provisioning.  Dynamic provisioning is all about matching building and workplace service delivery to variable workplace occupancy demand across the working week – it is the next generation building and facilities management service delivery and outsourcing models ”.

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Successful delivery of dynamic provisioning requires accurate and up-to-date asset data as well as actual occupancy data.  Locatrix uses PlanStudio to capture building and facility asset and related data rapidly and accurately, and then visualise the assets and data for facilities and property managers and approved vendors through digital indoor floor plans.  This data can then be used to inform workplace servicing needs.

Cleaning and maintenance are prime examples of services requiring dynamic provisioning service delivery.  Issuing a daily cleaning plan from PlanStudio which reflects just the cleaning tasks that need to be performed, is much more cost effective than the traditional approach.  Plant and equipment maintenance schedules can be similarly optimised to prolong operating life and reduce costs. 

Variable workplace occupancy associated with work flexibility poses an additional challenge: how to ensure employee health and wellbeing and fire safety compliance.  

Locatrix’ s PlanSafe, an online emergency management platform, uses site specific data collected by PlanStudio, to customise a view to anyone who needs fire safety training.  PlanSafe cuts time-to-train to between 20 and 30 minutes and the training can be performed any time anywhere on a mobile device.  In a world of flexible hybrid work, PlanSafe can be used to train all employees, ensuring safe building evacuation at all times.  PlanSafe is already in use across many industries with over 300,000 users.

“Ultimately, the Locatrix thin twin, working in conjunction with other technologies, could enable facility management service providers to deliver virtual FM to clients and solve the challenge of dynamic provisioning as hybrid work becomes institutionalised in a post pandemic world.  The opportunity is to reduce the cost of asset capture and increase asset data accuracy and usefulness for clients, reduce operating costs, and at the same time to enhance workplace experience for employees.”