FMO | FACILITY MAINTENANCE (AS-A-SERVICE) EN

 

eMAINT

Facility maintenance-as-a-service

Like energy efficiency-as-a-service, building owners also can enter into ongoing agreements to provide facility maintenance.

In this model, a vendor may charge a flat, ongoing service fee for a set of facility maintenance services. The vendor typically has enough experience and uses technology to reduce the costs required to provide this offering.

This technology can include (a) sensors to monitor critical assets, or (b) simple mobile apps that enable staff to request services as they are needed.

 

The goal is to prompt a request for service, rather than requiring a service provider to check in and spend time trying to determine if something is broken or needs attention.

Additionally, by aggregating facility services through a single master vendor, there are efficiencies of scale.

 

Facility management-as-a-service vendors seek to reduce the overall costs to deliver the services. This reduction in cost increases the margin for the as-a-service vendor.

 

So far, this model has been deployed primarily in retail and restaurant applications. These buildings typically are small and do not have complex building systems that would require full-time, on-site expertise.

But the aggregated energy and facility costs for a given retail or restaurant firm’s portfolio is significant. There is value in reducing these costs, but it must be done in a labor-efficient way.

Technology-enabled as-a-service models can provide better outcomes and address these previously hard-to-serve buildings.

For example, an as-a-service vendor may deploy HVAC mechanics only after a particular unit has exceeded a certain number of runtime hours, instead of performing maintenance on a schedule.

 

Currently, a store manager (even of a large retailer) may have a list of key vendors to call when some type of facility service is required. This could include HVAC repair, landscaping, or even snow removal for the parking lot.

This store manager may have limited visibility of how competitive vendors’ prices are, and also may have a non-standard approach to paying invoices (and it likely is paper-based).

 With a facility management-as-a-service vendor, this store manager can request these services more easily through software, and has some certainty that the vendors are vetted and priced competitively.

The FM-as-a-service vendor can manage scheduling and payment, leaving the store manager to focus on more mission-critical tasks.