Analyst Reports
Service providers are facing new challenges around contract compliance, optimizing service delivery and operating efficiency. In the area of soft services, technology - particularly hyperautomation - is key to meeting these challenges. Planon, alongside partners like AddOnn, offers support in an increasingly changeable business landscape.
Market challenges
Shifting customer demands are creating new trends that businesses must be aware of. On the soft services side, service providers are being pushed towards performance-based contracts, to provide more transparency, meet sustainability targets, and engage with rapidly evolving technological developments. This creates a highly dynamic work environment for service providers to grapple with. At the same time, these service providers are also faced with an operational challenge.
“Soft services, in particular, are highly resource-intensive with extremely tight margins,” Marc Wetzelaer, Managing Director of AddOnn, said. “Consequently, proper capacity planning can have a huge impact on profitability. Managing these two challenges: the market requirement for a more dynamic environment and the internal requirement for predictable capacity planning is (at least for cleaning) the main focus. Instead of fully on-demand cleaning or a completely rigid schedule, a mixed approach is necessary.”
Hyperautomation strategy
Fortunately, hyperautomation offers a way of balancing these new demands, incorporating new digital solutions, and moving towards a strategy of flexible predictability. Of course, first of all, businesses need to digitalize and automate their processes but after that, hyperautomation can leverage tools like robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and process mining to greatly improve the decision-making process and optimize business workflows.
By employing a hyperautomation strategy, businesses can harness data from a host of IoT sensors and software platforms to forecast and more accurately predict evolving customer demands and business trends. With proper base capacity planning, service providers can protect their margins. And at the same time, new insights gathered from a hyperautomated approach may lead to entirely new business models.
Cleaning up
One of the areas where hyperautomation is having a major impact concerns soft services - particularly cleaning. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic placed a renewed emphasis on hygiene, cleaning was an essential part of the FM service offering. Now, with workplace shifts around occupancy levels and service transparency emerging, businesses are tasked with delivering smarter cleaning services that are more efficient and of a higher quality.
One of the tools helping businesses revamp their cleaning process is CleanOnn, a fully integrated mobile solution connected to Planon Universe that offers full support for organizations to streamline their cleaning processes - from initial contract registration, capacity and operational planning, all the way to operations, quality review and billing preparation. Developed by AddOnn, CleanOnn enables businesses to come up with a base activity plan, complete with built-in automation to support the creation of optimal capacity and operational planning for the coming period.
Working together
While CleanOnn’s cockpit and dashboard provide real-time insights, the way that the platform works in combination with Planon Universe is what truly delivers benefits for service providers.
“For CleanOnn, connecting with Planon’s digital ecosystem provides native access to a large number of other relevant processes, which can inform our own solution,” Wetzelaer explained. “After all, cleaning does not take place in a vacuum; it is influenced by maintenance, workplace management, and many other processes.”
CleanOnn can also tap into Planon’s existing IoT standards, meaning that integrations do not have to be built from scratch, which significantly reduces time to market. For customers, this also reduces the total cost of ownership because they only need to access one, unified platform as part of their broader hyperautomation strategy. While it’s true that there are already a lot of cleaning solutions on the market, they are generally standalone tools, meaning that customers are tasked with maintaining integrations between several different solutions.
Plus, as more digital tools enter the market, the ability to access them all through Planon Universe will become increasingly important to businesses. As an open platform company, Planon believes in delivering the best solutions for FM service providers by collaborating with our extensive (and growing) network of partners that can be found on the Marketplace.
“AddOnn is already developing a new solution for onboarding contracts called BoardOnn,” Wetzelaer added. “This digital platform, and countless other new tools, will soon become part of an evolving hyperautomation space that FM service providers will need to be aware of.”
What hyperautomation can bring to your soft services
Hyperautomation offers numerous benefits for companies, irrespective of their industry. When providing cleaning services, it’s a strategy that allows businesses to deliver more transparency, improve revenue administration, and increase contractual compliance. Do you want to find out more about how your business can benefit from having its full cleaning process lifecycle support accessed through a single, unified platform? Get in contact with Planon today.
Are you interested to find out how well your FM organization is prepared to reap the benefits of hyperautomation in general? Figure out where you stand and receive suggested next steps towards a hyperautomated organization with our short interactive assessment.
