Crossing the Digital Divide

The facility management profession itself is being pulled in many new directions. New titles, new technologies, new tools, new expectations and new workplace strategies have the industry working overtime. And if the facility management services provider is looking to retire and does not have the technology in place to manage and pass along important data, all the knowledge gained during these past few transitional years is also at risk of being lost.

In the U.S., the average age of an FM professional is 50 years old. More than 80 percent of these individuals are over 40, which means the next 15 years will see another shift in the demands being placed on FM service providers: fewer people asked to do much more. Similar industry age trends are occurring in Europe and across in-house and outsourced FM service providers.

There is hope. Current field service and maintenance management solutions can serve as a bank of institutional knowledge able to prepare FM practitioners for the facility management industry of the future.

It is time to explore how these technologies can help organizations and current facility teams promote the profession as an exciting, fulfilling option for the next generation.

Embrace technology to improve service delivery

Field service and maintenance management solutions are a repository of knowledge for facility data. These solutions can be a single source of information for asset data, maintenance histories, location data, condition assessments, work order data and process information. They can also reduce the impact of losing employees to retirement while serving as a source of expert assistance to remaining FM service providers.

How will these solutions help FM service providers do more with less? How will new FM service providers benefit from the knowledge of those no longer working? All good questions. There are four categories of solutions that will be useful for empowering future FM service providers.

Data capture, storage and management. In 2017, research into field services technologies found that roughly 52 percent of services organizations continued to capture field data manually. This is time-consuming and prone to inaccuracies. Not to mention, what happens when a technician has moved on, but those remaining cannot decipher the handwriting? This is where technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and voice-to-text transcribers can benefit organizations.

IoT sensors can accurately capture time series-based asset performance information such as vibrations or energy consumption. This information can be combined with contextual data for asset location, facility occupancy, weather and equipment utilization that is then used to provide an asset performance baseline. This baseline provides a benchmark against similar assets across a portfolio or against industry standards. Now understanding how assets are expected to perform, under what circumstances, is not solely stored in the minds of FM professionals.

When field notes are needed, voice-to-text technologies enable technicians to take hands-free notes, in the moment, that will be legible to others. This also removes the need for technicians to try to remember what notes they wanted to make if they put off writing job debriefs until the end of the day – an all-too-often occurrence, given that 73 percent of field technicians stated in a recent study that they spend too much of their day-to-day job on paperwork. The information captured through IoT sensors and voice-to-text devices can be stored in a digital twin of the facility for easy access and management. This becomes the source of facility institutional knowledge for future generations.

Mobile field service applications. Mobile devices have become ubiquitous for field services technicians. Research in 2021 found that 99.5 percent of field technicians used mobile devices in their field work. Portability enables field technicians to receive assignments remotely, instead of having to come back to the office for details. Everything, including available resources, work status, services required, services history and pre-planned work checklists, are sent to the technician’s phone or tablet.

Used as a mobile access point to the accumulated knowledge of an FM services provider, less experienced technicians can access, or be prompted to access, checklists that will walk them through steps for routine pre-planned activities, ensure they comply with health and safety requirements, and prompt them to complete end-of-work debriefs. All technicians can access historical documents to understand the maintenance histories of assets – what went wrong and how was it fixed. More than 80 percent of field technicians believe this information access proves useful for improving field service productivity and self-reliance, as found in the 2021 Service Council, Voice of the Field Service Engineer report.

Artificial intelligence (AI) for curation and access to information. Current and future field services technicians have an ever-increasing treasure trove of asset and facility data available to them. The question then becomes, how to prevent information overload? AI tools, based on large language models (LLM), are ideal solutions to curate and provide access to the right information needed for a particular activity. Current tools, such as ChatGPT can be trained on databases of asset information, user manuals and maintenance procedures. This is possible through private licensing of the technology or through open-source licensing of one of the many available solutions.

Once trained, these tools can then become a question-and-answer resource for experienced field technicians or technicians in training. For example, a field technician can use their mobile device to query a specific location, asset, maintenance issue to receive a prioritized list of potential problems and solutions. Chat interfaces based on large language models can also be used to simulate real-life training scenarios for field services technicians using their mobile devices.

Augmented reality (AR) and calling on expert assistance

A picture is worth a thousand words. Or, in this case, visual instructions for maintenance procedures displayed can be priceless. These instructions can be animations for how to implement a specific procedure or a video call with a remote colleague who can also see the issue and can help. Several wearable and mobile devices are on the market to support field service organizations with deploying these solutions. It is possible for field services technicians to have a mentor with them for each job, providing advice and guidance for implementing new processes or navigating unfamiliar equipment.

Improve technician self-reliance with faster information retrieval

Technology is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve a predetermined set of objectives. This means that technologies should be used strategically and not merely for the sake of it. AI, AR, mobile and IoT-based solutions should be assessed based on their ability to achieve specific goals, such as attaining business resilience while improving the self-reliance of both new recruits and experienced employees. This objective can be segmented into four broad initiatives:

1. Reduce time to onboard new staff. New employees will be hired with their own set of experiences and skills; however, they will still require onboarding and training to fit in with the organizational culture and job expectations. AI and mobile solutions that enable appropriate training and support an employee’s ability to search for and access the right information can accelerate the integration of new staff. Proper training and access to information can be the difference between employee success and failure, especially in FM services where safety and efficiency are top priorities.
2. Reduce time to find information. Research by the McKinsey Global Institute found that providing a searchable record of knowledge can reduce the time employees spend searching for company information by 35 percent. In addition to a searchable database, providing tools for information curation, based on current need, and mobile access could reduce time to information even further. This may result in additional organizational value through faster, more efficient problem solving and collaboration.
3. Reduce operational costs. Imagine hiring an FM services technician. This technician is expected to work on job orders five days per week. But instead, they work on job orders four days per week and the fifth day is solely spent searching for information. That is what is happening, across many industries including service industries, according to research by IDC and McKinsey Global Institute. This research found that improved communication and collaboration among workers could increase productivity between 20 to 25 percent. More time spent on completing tasks that drive bottom line value, more efficiently, will pay dividends in reduced costs to deliver services.
4. Increase client satisfaction. FM services is a frontline industry with many field employees having direct client contact. In these instances, clients want to know that their FM services providers are knowledgeable and efficient. Clients want to feel secure that the job will be done right the first time, and they want a good experience. To achieve this, services employees need to have empathy, good communication skills, problem solving skills and the right information to confidently address whatever challenge lies ahead. Research by PwC found that 73 percent of consumers stated that a good experience is key to influencing their brand loyalties. Satisfied customers that stay with brands contribute to profit growth of 25 percent or more according to research by Bain & Company. Good customer experiences, provided by frontline staff, gives a competitive edge.

Succeed with effective knowledge management

Effective knowledge management is a significant contributor to organizational performance. However, approaches to achieving success with knowledge management need to adapt to new ways of working and shifts in workforce compositions. Firms across industries, especially those in FM services delivery, will need to invest in technologies that augment their employees’ abilities if they want to remain successful. Research performed by Deloitte Insights found that 75 percent of organizations believe that creating and preserving knowledge across evolving workforces will be important for their immediate success. However, only 9 percent of research respondents think they are ready to address the knowledge concern.

What is holding many of these organizations back? Deloitte researchers found a range of concerns, including organizational knowledge silos, limited technology infrastructure, lack of an organizational mandate, and limited to no incentives for employee adoption. These are not “little obstructions,” but it is possible to overcome them with the right planning and buy-in from across the organization. Achieving this will be imperative if FM services providers want to be best prepared for the inevitable workforce evolution heading their way.