FMJ Facilities Management magazine providing industry-specific intelligence to FM and property professionals
HIDDEN BENEFITS
While digital platforms can improve productivity and make companies more efficient, there are some softer benefits of digitisation that are also good for the bottom line.
Worker wellbeing is in sharp focus at the moment, as the FM industry continues to experience labour shortages. This makes employee retention more important than ever, and digitisation can help. Switching to job management platforms means no more paperwork for field service personnel. This means they can focus on doing the ‘day job’ – utilising their skill set, rather than working on admin. The same is true of office staff, as automation and digitisation take care of more mundane tasks, freeing them up to do other things.
In addition, is much easier for field staff to work from home and have more flexible hours; they receive jobs on their phones and can manage themselves, with parts delivered directly to them rather than a depot, saving on travel time.
CASE STUDY: QUORA GROUP
Founded in 2005, Quora Group provides facilities management services nationwide to public and private sector clients. Quora uses the BigChange platform, which it says is enabling it to win new public sector tenders.
Craig Firth, Director and Co-Founder of Quora Group, said, “BigChange is definitely a sales tool for us and has helped us to grow the business. We work primarily in the public sector, with contracts predominantly in healthcare and education. In these environments there is a high level of compliance and documentation required. The software enables us to offer a far higher level of service in terms of digitised, evidence-based compliance and reporting than a company that still uses a paper-based system. It has been a big advantage for us in terms of winning and delivering these public sector contracts.”
Firth added: “The ability to adapt the work sheets is a great feature of the software. We have just won a big contract for a local authority, and that includes specific documentation that they want us to use. I can create a worksheet in the software and provide them with a document that is exactly what they want.
“We have service level agreements that require us to respond to emergencies within a certain time frame. With BigChange we can see the locations of the engineers in real-time, identify the person who is closest and has the right skill set to respond to the call-out, then inform the client with an accurate ETA.”
Quora Group has three ISO accreditations: 9001 (quality management), 14001 (environmental management), and 45001 (health and safety). BigChange has helped it achieve all three. “As part of our ISO management system we use BigChange to monitor and measure the greenhouse gas emissions from our vehicles,” added Firth. “It also helps with our health and safety management, because we can easily provide evidence that we have done what we said we were going to do.”
