21st Century Predictive Facilities Management – Utilising Mobile Technology as the Enabler.
For most companies, predictive facilities management (or predictive FM) is the current “holy grail” of the industry.
The reason that this is an attractive concept is that predicative FM in theory, would allow organisations to deliver pre-emptive services before an unfolding situation becomes critical. When something becomes critical, it is then more costly to rectify as resources and equipment need to be available as soon as possible, or there is a breach of SLA’s.
Imagine that you could predict that an asset is going out of tolerance, then a visit can be arranged at the FM provider’s convenience (and at the least expense), leading to a better service for the customer at a lower overall cost of delivery; clearly a win win!
To start delivering this type of service, there needs to be a number of technologies and principles in place. The enablers required to deliver Predictive FM are:
- A wide-reaching data network, that uses wired, wireless and mobile connections;
- Assets that have embedded “smart” technology or that can be augmented with smart tags;
- Mobile data capture and mobile process management tools, that are capable of interacting with current technology and are future-proofed to deal with dynamic technologies.
Well, the good news is that these enablers are already in place and are being referred to as “The Internet of Things”. This means that assets and items have the capability of transmitting their status/condition via the data networks.
Some assets already have “smart” embedded systems that can notify when conditions are beginning to reach the limit of tolerances. Those that do not have this capability can be augmented with smart tags that can monitor and be read to ascertain the current status of the asset.
TotalMobile’s mobile working solution can use the data to automatically schedule pre-emptive visits and provides details and tasks to engineers or staff with the required skills to carry out the remedial work.
The question is, what to do with this new data and information? The initial reaction is probably to start trying to put it into the legacy back-end asset system, but will this really drive innovation and a fundamental shift in the delivery mentality of FM companies?
This new way of working needs FM organisations to have a much more innovative approach into reviewing working practices, unconstrained by current thinking.
The question is, are you ready?
Contact us at www.totalmobile.co.uk/contact for more information.
