Where Do You Stand? — Compare Your FM Organization vs JLL’s Benchmark Survey (Part I)
“Yes, You Need to do More with Less”, and other Survey Insights
What you Need to Know — Technology will Drive Operations in 2023
A recent 2023 JLL survey confirmed that facility management teams are being asked to process more work orders with less resources (staff and budget). This article summarizes key trends and insights identified in the JLL report.
The need to do more with less necessitates adopting innovative technologies that can deliver gains in efficiency and productivity. Workflow automation is essential for managing work orders at scale. Short-handed FM teams will be the future norm. Mass retirement of aging facility managers along with hiring freezes and budget constraints create obstacles to full staffing. Facility managers identified labor shortages among their top concerns for 2023, along with shortages of parts and equipment, decreasing budgets, inflation, and recession fears.
Survey Description and Demographics
Both JLL and non-JLL customers from North America were surveyed during the spring of 2023 — so the survey results are timely and represent post-COVID trends and data. Part I is a Facility manager survey, while part II is a look at Corrigo CMMS Work Order data (Volume and Cost).
State of FM — Do More with Less
Executing work orders is the lifeblood of any FM organization. 62% of facility managers expect to process more work orders in 2023 than in 2022. This is especially challenging because 48% of FM teams are understaffed. Gains in productivity (output / input) and efficiency (useful output / input) are necessary to enable shorthanded FM teams to process more work orders.
Obstacles to Full FM Staffing
52.4% of FMs cited “hiring freezes or budget constraints” as the major hiring obstacle. Additional challenges include a scarcity of well-qualified candidates (36.2%) and a competitive job market that is driving up hiring costs. The mass retirement of older facility managers has created a generational shift in the workforce and caused a significant loss of institutional knowledge.
Automation is the Key to Managing Work Orders at Scale
To better manage work orders at scale, workflows must be streamlined by automating manual and repetitive tasks. The number one expectation for a work order management solution is automating tasks (52.2%), particularly in the creation, assignment, and completion of work orders. This frees up time for higher-value activities.
Advanced mobile app functionality is also important for faster work order completion (46.2%). To manage the increasing volume of work orders, FM teams must be productive wherever they are, with on-the-go access to maintenance histories and fast approvals.
FM Operations are Primed for Automation
Over 49% of FMs answered that “tracking work order progress” is an area that benefits greatly from automation. FM software should enable stakeholders to easily check work order status for themselves (self-service), thereby relieving FM teams of fulfilling this frequent request.
Because FM’s business value is tied closely to cost management, leadership needs internal performance metrics, like total work order volume and related costs, to evaluate FM effectiveness. FM reporting of performance metrics can be automated and integrated with financial reporting, making the information readily accessible.
Asset Management Priorities
FMs said that doing more preventive maintenance (PM) was a high priority (67.4%) because of its ability to extend asset life and safeguard uptime. Extending asset life provides flexibility for capital asset renewal (53.8%) so that repair vs replace decisions can avoid supply chain issues (parts and equipment shortages, long lead-times). FMs are relying more on business intelligence to guide these high-stakes “repair vs replace” decisions.
Predictive maintenance IoT sensors are being leveraged to provide data to track asset health / performance and to monitor building spaces for energy efficiency, comfort, and security. IoT sensors detect asset temperature, vibration, water flow, and occupancy issues and communicate them directly to a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). IoT issues can be triaged manually or dispatched via work order automatically to a technician or service provider without human intervention.
70.5% of respondents list preventive maintenance scheduling as the top outcome expected from their asset management software / CMMS. Business intelligence is expected to provide actionable insights about capital asset replacement, expensive assets and facilities, and budgeting. Mobile capability is expected to help service assets on the go by providing remote access to service histories, photos, manuals, etc.
Use of Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence (BI) is no longer a tool just for IT teams or for the C-suite; it is available to business line functions such as facilities management. BI insights can assist understaffed FM teams to streamline inefficient workflows, identify and schedule assets for replacement, evaluate service providers, and analyze costs. Capturing gains in efficiency and operational performance leads to saving money.
BI works automatically in the background and presents management-level metrics for quickly understanding FM performance. FM teams don’t have to spend weeks digging through data to calculate relevant metrics and uncover the insights / prescriptive recommendations that BI generates in real-time.
Top Concerns — What Keeps You up at Night
Parts and equipment shortages are the top concern (51.9%). Replacement of failing equipment is a major challenge when none is available. One facility manager described the situation as “bandaid maintenance” — continually repairing aging equipment that should instead by replaced.
The threat of decreasing budgets (48.1%) is a major concern. It fuels concerns over FM hiring freezes, labor shortages, and inability to retain existing staff (45.4%).
Shrinking budgets coupled with concern over inflation or recession (46.0%), create the unwanted side effect that preventive maintenance is treated as optional. This leads to more reactive repairs, which are higher cost than PM over the long term and take longer to complete.
Lastly, FM labor shortages will persist in the years ahead due to the significant retirement of aging FMs, the legacy of COVID layoffs, and the small number of new entrants to the FM industry.
Software Investment Outlook
It would seem to make sense that an increase in FM software investment would be called for to address the need to perform more work with less staff, especially if it can compensate for understaffing. Only 42.2% expect investments to increase, while 44.3% expect it to stay the same.
Despite these results, FMs do see technology as a viable strategy for driving efficiency, recapturing time, and boosting productivity.
Summary
The Challenge: Process more work orders with less staff and smaller budgets.
How FM teams will get more done:
● FM software automation — will streamline workflows, save time and money, and better position teams for processing more work orders (capture gains in efficiency & productivity)
● Preventive maintenance — extends asset life and safeguards uptime. PM takes on new importance because parts & equipment shortages dictate that existing equipment must remain in service longer.
● Business intelligence — enables data-driven decisions for equipment repair vs. replace, service provider networks, and internal FM operations. BI data informs budgets and asset replacement schedules.
● A mobile app — with real-time updates and access to asset maintenance histories, enables FMs on the go to have all the information they need at their fingertips for processing more work orders.
How We Can Help You Do More with Less
Virtual Facility’s software for alarm and integrated workflow management delivers on the key technology elements of the JLL survey, helping you improve efficiency and productivity, and manage work orders at scale:
● Streamline the Reactive Work Process — Work orders can be spawned directly from a BAS alarm(s) and dispatched manually or automatically via CMMS.
● Automate Workflow — “Automation rules” create and dispatch work orders automatically for alarms that meet pre-defined criteria.
● Reduce Ineffective (Repeat) Work — Real-time status on work success provides feedback loop to improve performance (if the alarm doesn’t clear or it returns in 24 hours, then the repair was not successful).
● Targeted Business Intelligence — Predefined analytics serve up actionable insights to evaluate FM performance and provide real-time data to support repair vs replace decisions.
● Mobile App Capability — Respond to and monitor alarm-driven reactive work from anywhere.
Email us: makebetterwork@vfacility.ai
Read Part II: “Where Do You Stand? — Compare Your FM Organization vs JLL’s Benchmark Survey (Part II)”
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