Keep up with the rapid pace of digitization and innovation in the world of real estate & facility management and learn more about Planon's open platform strategy.
With the increasing focus on measurable business value and the need for operational excellence – alongside today’s challenge of enabling a safe return to the workplace – the use of supportive software solutions for real estate and facility management has become widely accepted and common practice.
The business case for these software solutions is usually based on themes like portfolio transparency, control, processing efficiency, cost reduction, organizational agility, customer value and compliance.
However, many organizations find it challenging to choose the right software solution for their needs, evidenced by the fact that some software implementations do not deliver the planned results. Reasons for failure can be very diverse but typically include gaps between expectations and reality, underestimating the effort needed during implementation and for change management, as well as unexpected complexity in IT technology and operations.
Just a few years ago, buying software solutions to automate real estate and facilities management processes was approached quite differently than it is today. More often than not, organizations debated between point solutions (for solving a single solution) and integrated solutions: either you chose to implement a number of point solutions ad hoc to piece together requirements or you tried to cover as many functional requirements as possible with one integrated solution. Now, in 2021, it is time to look at it differently.
A huge wave of various technology innovations is becoming available in the real estate market – referred to as Property Technology (PropTech). They represent a fundamental move towards digitization around buildings and offer highly specialized functionality for each business problem, providing a better experience to the users and becoming easier to deploy and replace.
Therefore, we are moving away from an either/or to a both/and attitude; viewing point solutions as complimentary to integrated solutions. In this new vision, your starting point to future-proof your real estate and facility management processes, is deploying an IWMS as an open application platform with a seamless connection to PropTech. An important prerequisite is that an IWMS must have the fundamental capability to easily connect with those new technologies and embed them in the processes they support. When positioning it like this, an IWMS platform really functions as the “single pane of glass” for real estate and facility management professionals to manage their business. It provides corporate-wide solutions and ensures data quality and consistency with one single source of truth that also includes data from all required specialized applications and local building technology. In that case, an integrated solution and point solutions can go hand in hand.
Originally an IWMS was developed around the integration of real estate and facility management business functions, like real estate management, asset and maintenance management, service management and others. The consequence of the emergence of PropTech, is that these IWMS solutions must not only add the fundamental capability to connect and integrate the new technologies that relate to the specific processes they support, but they must also be able to handle the increased variety of technologies and solutions used for an organization’s real estate portfolio.
For organizations with larger real estate portfolios it is almost impossible to avoid diversity and variety, because often each building or location has a different infrastructure, utilizes different technology (BMS and IoT), and may even be held to different rules and regulations. This has led Planon to position its IWMS as an Open Application Platform to become an even more sustainable option for the future. As well as providing the functionality to support all workplace management related business processes, it offers customers and partners the ability to connect (PropTech) solutions directly onto the platform technology stack for seamless interaction with the business processes supported by Planon’s IWMS.
This enables your organization to move into the digitized era of real estate and facility management business. An IWMS functions as the integrator on a technology and business level, by offering the highest flexibility for ongoing adoption of new technologies and possibilities for maximum support of end-user needs, and maximum contribution to the business processes that run in one single source of truth.
