Technology Advancement in Facility Management

This blog covers how technology is transforming property management and facility management.

Everything is going high tech today. In the last 10 years, banks have more than 60% of users accessing banking services from mobile devices. Our sites generate 70% traffic from mobile users. Electric cars are in India and making their way into our life. Our homes have a lot more automation for our comfort. Then why would facility management not have any advancement?
How we operate our business has completely changed.

 

 

Visitor Management Applications

We at Crest have gotten rid of registers from 2018 with help of visitor management applications. Having hundreds of registers with data about who visited when and what time to what flat was recorded earlier. Imagine when you are investigating an incident and you want to check who visited a specific wing and specific apartment between 2 pm to 3 pm in the afternoon of one of the days in 2019. Imagine the nightmare of going through stores and finding registers to look for data versus login into the application; filter data and looking for data. Now with the latest COVID 19 updates, we can be assured that the Zomato delivery boy has a normal temperature. Well that's could not have happened years back and having that information available to the end-user in real-time was not even the requirement. 

Apartment Management Applications

Gone are the days when anyone can say a request was not received. Today you can create your own request for water clogging in the kitchen sink or cat locked out on the balcony. Not only that you can track progress available to you with the tracker. Now, these features are available to apartment owner but for facility management staff there is more to it. We get the entire 365 days maintenance activities of equipment and services set up done in the calendar so that we get reminders and track the completion of activities. For the Resident's Welfare Association (RWA), entire accounting and billing are available on the phone for each apartment and property. 

Introduction of Robotics

We have started introducing robotic swimming pool cleaning on a trial basis. We are getting information on downtime, cleaning cycle, operating cost of electricity, cost of maintenance and ease of handling. If you think robotic cleaning is without human intervention then you are in the 22nd century already. Robotics in facility management does require manual intervention such as start, stop and monitoring. We are sure to have more and more robotics introduced in the coming decade to manage and improve facility management services. 

Technology for Advance Machinery

The trade-off between manpower application and automation is clearly in favour of automation. However, the first building block of transformation is the use of equipment to reduce manpower dependency and then use advanced equipment that helps improve service delivery quality and reduce overall cost. At Crest, we continuously introduce machinery and automation. It is a process whereby we want to reduce the cost for our customers by adopting machinery and or automation. Detailed analysis of how upfront capital investment in machinery helps save over time is important. If Tesla automation is not usable in India for Indian road condition then one is paying mainly for brand and not complete utility of the automation feature. That's the inefficient application of funds. We introduce and use safety equipment like hydraulic platforms to the trade of H frame rental cost and avoid accidents, we use ride-on scrubbers which are imported from Italy with the highest quality that uses lesser water for cleaning driveways and parings, we use a thermal gun to check the temperature of the electrical system to identify hot spots to check issues. A creative way to adopt the use of sensors that adopts different seasons and varying sunrise and sunset timings to save energy costs. 

Constraints

We are fortunate that our clients understand the need of introducing technology. However, there are challenges of adaptation by end-users, continuous training, network issues for mobile devised based applications, upgrades that come faster than ever meaning discontinuation of models in use. These challenges are part of all industry which is adopting technology for driving efficiency. They are being worked on and solved as we progress but takes sometimes years. At Crest, we relentlessly have gone through these periods and are continuously working on constraints to implement faster adaptation of technology and drive efficiency. 

Author: Siddharth Bhatt. The author is CEO of Crest Property Solutions. One of the leading facility management company that managed large and high-end properties across multiple locations.