Maya Angelou once said, “At the end of the day, people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.” The same is true for buildings. No matter how well-designed a building is or how much tech it is using, the only thing most occupants will remember is how the building made them feel. But in order to make someone feel good when they are inside a building, a lot of thought needs to go into both the physical and digital infrastructure that connects the building with the person.
Thinking about the occupant’s experiences means zooming out and looking at every touch point a person has with a property, both digital and physical. Having this experience-focused mindset requires property companies to go through a complete digital transformation. Understanding what kind of experience people are having and finding ways to make it better means using a Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) that goes beyond just maintenance management.
One company that recently went through this kind of digital transformation was Investa. Investa Property Group, one of Australia’s largest commercial real estate companies, has more than 550,000 square meters under management. Many of the buildings that they own are quite advanced, but they wanted a flexible way to streamline property operations and deliver a seamless tenant and contractor experience across their entire portfolio. One of the barriers to achieving this was that they were heavily reliant on manual data input and extraction into and out of multiple siloed systems. Most of their O&M heavy lifting was happening outside their CMMS system.
As a result, Investa’s operational processes were slow and error-prone. With over 2,000 contracted vendors, it was difficult to keep track of vendor entries and exits, invoices and purchase orders, payment cycles, and task completions.
“Information spread over multiple systems restricts data visibility to get a more holistic view of operational performance and enables better experiences for our clients,”
said Georgina Rodowicz, IT Project Manager at Investa.
Resolving a work order would mean input into multiple platforms, and reports were not automatically linked and stored. This operational model did not scale for their growing portfolio, as the addition of new buildings meant more data to process manually. It became extremely difficult to centrally manage tenant and visitor needs—and experience took a back seat.
After reviewing over twelve different tools to unify their portfolio operations, Investa chose Facilio’s Connected CMMS solution.
“Facilio’s differentiated approach and strong references in the real estate industry convinced us that it was possible to do more with less,”
said Paul Vandervlis, General Manager of Facilities Services of Investa.
“The flexibility of Facilio to orchestrate and automate dynamic operational processes also stood out. We were confident that their connected CMMS would help us deliver a scalable and nimble operational experience for our clients and other stakeholders.”
Facilio’s Connected CMMS brought together every single app and legacy system currently used in Investa’s operations and fed the data into a single platform that automated tasks that were otherwise performed manually. As a result, they were able to automate routine maintenance tasks, bring efficiency to daily operations, and make way for better engagement between vendors and clients.
For Investa, as is the case for many large portfolios, selecting an operations software wasn’t straightforward. While CMMS has been around for a while, they have often not been connected in a way that made them capable of being the only tool necessary to run an entire real estate portfolio. The traditional way of CMMS existing in silos doesn’t cut it anymore for managing large, geographically distributed portfolios that each have different processes and stakeholders. But with a connected CMMS, your operations team can meaningfully connect systems, people, and processes and actually raise the bar on how operations and maintenance are managed.
