In this webinar Planon and Verdantix explain how facility management service providers can successfully meet their business objectives and customer expectations by using data and technology.
In the modern world of business, we expect everything to be digital and connected. In reality, many service providers still struggle with automating their operations.
For many facility management service providers, embracing technology and digitalising their business is nothing new. However, some still struggle to automate complex operations. If these service providers want to professionalise their maintenance management processes, there are three key questions they need to ask themselves.
The answers to these questions will help service providers define the next steps towards a digitalised and automated maintenance process. This ultimately creates efficiencies, saves money, increases customer satisfaction, and encourages business innovation. Let’s take a closer look at each of these three questions.
Most service providers have a standard list of offerings with standard pricing. However, in practice, this can vary widely. Do you have standard packages for reactive maintenance, planned maintenance, cleaning, and other services? And how often do you need to combine these offerings, resulting in bespoke pricing?
When details of these services are stored in a central location, it becomes easier to create proposals, benchmark customer projects, drive the efficiency of your service delivery and offer transparency to your customers.
When onboarding a new client, a service provider often needs to conduct an assessment of their properties, upload BIM and CAD drawings, and collect all sorts of information about the client. But this customer will also have their own unique contract, which can result in specific requirements. Therefore, there are two types of client information you should take into account:
By taking this into account, the system can help you in various ways during the entire process, for example in defining whether you need to make a proposal before starting work, depending on the type of work, whether the expected costs are above a certain threshold, or even included in the existing contract. It can also help in calculating the rate for different types of work, travel duration or execution outside working hours. This helps you to automatically invoice the correct amount for work performed based on agreed rates.
Finally, you also need to fully understand who does the work you have been contracted to deliver. Service providers rely on a delicate balance of their own employees and subcontractors to provide these services.
Providing this information to a resource scheduling tool powered by Artificial Intelligence allows it to automatically assign employees and subcontractors based on skills, availability, route and contract rates.
Consider the benefits of one software platform with all this information – a software platform that centralises the relationships and contracts you have with customers. It can help digitalise and modernise your maintenance efforts by automating the creation of proposals, assignment of work, and invoicing processes.
Planon Universe for Service Providers includes best practice workflows for maintenance management and other processes. But the true innovation and automation comes from having all the base information included in an integrated software platform. From this starting point, each service provider can use their own proprietary business processes.