FMJ Facilities Management magazine providing industry-specific intelligence to FM and property professionals
According to Deloitte, the global CRE and FM landscape faces a period of rapid evolution, shaped by economic uncertainty and a renewed focus on efficiency and value. This year’s World FM Day theme was ‘Resilience in action: FM thriving in a world of change’ but is the sector still struggling to ensure that FM is viewed as a strategic partner in ensuring organisational success?
THE COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR’S VIEW
RORY MURPHY,
COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR, VINCI FACILITIES
Deloitte in their recent paper talk about ‘rapid evolution’ while World FM day chose to focus on ‘resilience in action’ when summarising the FM marketplace globally. Whether we focus on evolution or resilience, what is true about both statements is that they signify a market which is fluid, developing, adapting and in some quarters recovering from what has been an economic tsunami over the last five years.
The post-covid recovery from 2022, including supply chain issues, rapid energy spikes, followed by continued global unrest have meant that organisations around the world must remain agile and reactive to rapidly changing market forces. The UK economy also had its own series of economic shocks as it struggled to break out of a cycle of low growth.
It is against this backdrop that organisations have had to look at every element of their delivery, ensuring that for key services such as FM, the delivery model reflects the flexibility that is required to allow those organisations to shape, move and shift as the market dictates.
The role of FM suppliers is to help their customers achieve their own business or organisational objectives, so the question as to whether FM is seen as a ‘strategic’ partner very much depends on how effective and transformative that support becomes.
The constant drive for efficiency and value will always be the baseline for FM partners but it is when FM can demonstrate value creation outside of the normal contractual metrics that true collaboration begins. To build these new collaborative models, however, an investment of time from both parties will be required to fully align service delivery with the purpose or vision of the organisation. Once a deep understanding of what success looks like and how this can be achieved and monitored is formed, then a strategic framework can be constructed and the ‘partnership credo’ as described by Deloitte can blossom.
To most organisations the efficient operation of their assets is a significant element of their success and their cost base, but it is not their key skill set. To move from a transactional relationship though to a ‘strategic’ one however, requires FM organisations to be able to demonstrate a level of insight and expertise that unlocks opportunities that would remain untapped without their intervention. The driver for much of this new insight is technology and the ability to mine the data produced to improve operational outcomes, whether in relation to the performance of the assets themselves, or the employee or customer experience when working or visiting those assets is FM’s secret ingredient.
The challenge though, and this is picked up by Deloitte, is that to enable this strategic relationship and embrace this ‘partnership credo’ there needs to be the development of transparent contractual frameworks which drive ‘both collaboration and fiscal discipline’. The ‘rapid evolution’ that Deloitte signify may well be an evolution from seeing FM provision purely as another cost to manage to a strategically important element of achieving the vison of the organisations they support, which may move procurement from a transactional activity to a transformative one.
Economic uncertainty which has disrupted global business for the last five years shows little sign of diminishing, so establishing true partners and building deep relationships across your whole supplier base my well help deliver the resilience that organisations will need to navigate this constant change.
