Tell us IBM’s “why” in the FM world?

Companies are facing a new set of challenges recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic workplace disruption. Not only is the global economy still digesting the financial impact of factory closures, supply chain disruptions, and economic incentive programs, companies are dealing with the unprecedented change in the workplace dynamic. For the foreseeable future hybrid work is here to stay. In response, companies are managing under-utilized and unutilized office space – which introduces lease management and capital planning challenges, operations and maintenance challenges and space planning challenges. In this environment companies must reevaluate their real estate and facility management processes/solution. Their real estate/facilities management challenges are interconnected and really rely on the same data foundation for optimizing their processes and decision making – they can no longer rely on manual processes or siloed solutions to successfully manage their properties. Companies must adopt an integrated management environment which rationalizes an end-to-end solution for the property lifecycle -from acquisition through disposal. The lifecycle solution should help address processes like property acquisition, space build-out, lease management, space planning/management, operations and maintenance, sustainability and the final property disposal. A life cycle solution can create and leverage a single-source of truth (information) across all the processes ensuring decision making is timely, optimized, and clearly reported.

How is IBM changing and improving the FM industry?

The IBM TRIRIGA Application Suite is a leading Integrated Workplace Management Solution (IWMS) which offers an end-to-end lifecycle solution for managing real estate and facilities. One value of an integrated solution is that you do not need to worry about managing connections for the basics of property management – this saves time, money, and resources, while also being fundamentally more reliable. This means TRIRIGA offers comprehensive functionality to manage your properties from acquisition through disposal without locking you into a pre-defined process - TRIRIGA can be customized for any unique characteristics of your business as well as offer extensions to interconnect with your IT ecosystem and third-party applications. The ability of TRIRIGA to manage complex asset portfolios has been time-tested by Fortune 500 companies, while at the same time TRIRIGA’s ability to start small and grow as needed is what sets it apart. Many companies can justify TRIRIGA adoption based on its ability to help them resolve a single major real estate/facility management challenge. Once in place they realize they can easily expand its usage across other areas of their property lifecycle management, eventually leveraging the wealth of the TRIRIGA solution to establish a complete end-to-end solution. TRIRIGA’s ability to establish that single source of property management information is the cornerstone of the power of an integrated workplace solution. The TRIRIGA Application Suite is so adaptable that IBM Global Real Estate selected it as their real estate and FM solution for IBM’s global properties after a comprehensive market evaluation.

Why should FMs pick IBM as a partner?

We believe that the TRIRIGA Application Suite is uniquely positioned to help companies manage the entire lifecycle of their real estate and facilities portfolio in an optimal fashion. As an integrated IWMS TRIRIGA offers companies one solution that can manage from the acquisition of the real estate asset through its life to its eventual disposal. The integrated lifecycle management architecture enables each of the facility management processes to share the same trusted information – reinforcing the data’s validity as well as building a comprehensive and invaluable repository of facility information. This shared information not only eliminates redundant work but compounds the TRIRIGA value proposition.

Albeit some businesses are hesitant to embrace integrated solutions for fear of lock-in, not being able to select individual best-of-breed point solutions, or for budget limitations – an integrated facilities management still provides the best bang-for-the-buck. TRIRIGA’s architecture is open and supports industry standard interfaces for data exchange eliminating lock-in. Point solutions are just that – point solutions – that do not readily share and leverage common data, require upfront investment to integrate, require long-term investment to maintain custom interfaces and rarely deliver the promised value because they only address one element of optimizing a facility’s lifecycle. And even if budget limitations are real, they more often are used as an excuse for not making the needed investment. IBM is addressing this challenge of budget limits with the introduction of the TRIRIGA Essential bundles. These are targeted point enablements which provide the client a solution for FM challenges at an aggressive price but still based on the TRIRIGA integrated architecture, which allows for the client to enable additional functionality over time so they can stretch out their budget allocation.

IBM’s history and reputation in delivering solutions and working with clients to help them address business issues and opportunities is unchallenged. IBM TRIRIGA is a market leading real estate and facilities management solution. There is a strong ecosystem of business partners to help companies quickly configure, integrate and operationalize TRIRIGA into their business processes.