No time to waste

Monitoring performance again adheres to the Uber model, as operatives press a button when on their way to a job, which informs the customer or site contact that they are on their way. Again, like Uber, clients can follow the vehicle on an interactive map, convenient for a site manager who doesn’t have to wait around for their arrival. Managers are also given the registration number of the truck or van and can receive an image of the operatives themselves if there are security issues.

To ensure compliance, essential documentation, including insurances and licences, are stored digitally. Crews use the app at collection to enter the size and weight of the waste, before and after photos or video, and customer signatures, then again at disposal to record the recycling facility and upload a photo of the tipping receipt. In this way, customers are provided with an end-to-end waste audit trail, which is also accessible via an online customer portal.

Says Mohr: “This gives us a good indicator of the level of service, as the feedback goes into the database; if any rating is low, it is brought to the operations manager to check. The service partner also gets copied into that email, which means they can check on their people. The technology makes it super easy for them, even creating and sending them invoices and giving them optional work if they need it.”

BENEFITS FOR FM
It’s an effective model which has obviously had huge success in the consumer sector, but it is not the norm in FM, where the vast majority of national reactive maintenance organisations use in-house crews or a traditional, regional subcontractor model. Could the concept be applied to the business to business FM model?

Naturally, Mohr believes it could. “Profit margins and efficiencies happen a lot in FM, no matter what the responsive service agreed. For instance, with repairs, you may want a building contractor to come superfast, but to offer this kind of service a maintenance team would have to sit around with extra capacity, which is why that level of service costs so much money due to the unused overheads. It’s how traditional businesses work, but I believe the digital model could work in many subsets of services, not even necessarily reactive, such as cleaning. In fact, it would work anywhere where there’s an organisation with a large field force.

“Currently they might have a huge PAYE they are trying to manage, but this model would enable them to get rid of all that and deal with a number of small businesses who have their own clients too, so can choose whether or not to do the work. For the services supplier this means that rather than having one reactive maintenance subcontractor covering an area, you have 15 or 20 of them, all really good small businesses who get offered these jobs and can choose whether or not they want to take them on.”

Persuading established FM corporates to take such a radical step won’t be easy, however. “With the current model,” Mohr argues, “you can guarantee that they are going to be massively inefficient because they’ve got these massive legacy systems. But there are people with big jobs in charge of these people who wouldn’t adopt a load of tech to do them out of their own job.” He warns that the facilities sector can’t afford to put its head in the sand, because rising stars in tech-enabled businesses who have built credibility and capability in the consumer sector will start to look at opportunities within business services.

Big corporates could put a toe in the water, he suggests, by setting up baby brands. “These could technically be ground zero pure tech platforms, but the corporates could use their big brand and their client base to experiment and grow alongside it. In this way, they have a separate management team empowered to operate in an agile way, with support from the mother ship to give them credence in the marketplace with suppliers.”

But, he concludes, it needs to happen soon. “It needs someone to say ‘let’s do this’, to deliver FM services in a more sustainable and cost-effective way.”