PFM has developed a series of articles depicting key aspects of the last 25 years of FM, when it was founded. In this article, FMLink is reproducing three of them, on office environments, energy management and software for FMs. Other articles in this section of the PFM March issue may be seen directly on PFM; these cover the topics of: safety and health, roles of FM professionals and how British FMs have helped to spread FM across Europe.
Designed for Work
PFM: “First, tell us a little bit about your background in the FM industry and in the office interiors business. How have things have changed?”
Ann: “I’ve been in the industry since 1989, when the standard office furniture at the time was heavy, panel-based and pretty immovable stuff — when you needed people trained in assembly, with special toolkits, to put them together and take them apart. They were not pieces of furniture you would want to move very often. That’s the big difference really — the fixed natureof office furniture reflected more regimented ways of working which are now much more open and flexible — much more about people and how they work best and less about the rigid control of the working environment. So I’ve seen quite a lot of change in office design, and in the way that companies in the office furniture, design and fit-out business have developed their services and their approaches accordingly.
Of course, as the work context changes, managers have also had to learn new ways of working, and FMs are constantly faced with the challenges of managing people and what you might call the ‘effective workplace’, not just the buildings, spaces and facilities. I’m still associated with the industry, on a consultancy basis in Echo Marketing, working with a number of companies in the sector, and with Harrow Green in particular, which is a good example of a company that’s developed its service offer to fit the demands of today’s FM market. ”
PFM: “What do you think have been the main drivers for change?”
Ann: “I think there have been three main areas that have accounted for the rapid change we have seen — technology, legislation and people. People don’t work, and won’t work, the way we have done in previous generations. There’s plenty of compelling research around to suggest that productivity is linked to the work environment. People work in less formal ways with more independence and flexibility both about how they work and where they work. On the other hand, they need the support and collaboration of colleagues and managers, and a sense of belonging. So that move away from being tied to your desk, and being seen to be working, to more open and trusted ways of working sets up some tensions, and one of the main challenges for FMs is getting that balance right. ”
PFM: “You mentioned technology. Laptops, email and mobile technology have all changed the way we work.”
Ann: “Yes. We don’t always need to be in the office. And when we are we spend more of our time on the phone, texting, emailing, even on social networks, making it harder to separate social spaces from workspaces. Everything has speeded up, and though we don’t create quite as much paper as we once did, we certainly send more emails than we ever sent letters. And pretty well everyone takes care of their own correspondence and communications. Not having the central pool of typists and filing clerks that every office once had has also changed the way office spaces are configured. We’re seeing a more networked approach to working in teams, and more mobility.”
PFM: “The fact that we’re having this conversation in the local coffee shop with just a laptop between us is indicative of the way we’ve moved on.”
Ann: “The effective office has to take account of that, with a lot more movement in and out of a smaller office space. That has environmental advantages in terms of the carbon footprint, but it also has economic benefits by reducing the occupation costs per employee. Mostly now we see open offices, often still with a cell structure, and separate meeting rooms plus informal meeting spaces or breakout areas. Different industries will have different configurations. As you’d expect, creative agencies work in much more interactive and collaborative, looser spaces than, say, the legal professions, who might retain more formality. But the changes run throughout business. Interestingly, while office simpler as a result, office chairs have got more sophisticated as designers respond to new ergonomic research and development.”
PFM: “How do you think the changes we’ve seen have affected the role of the FM?”
Ann: “The pace of technological change and its impact on the workplace means that people at work are constantly being asked to adjust to new ways of working and to develop new skills as well. The big word is ‘change’. Managing change and steering people through the transition, whether it’s an office move or a departmental restructure, means that FMs have a greater need to involve people in the change process. They need to learn how to handle staff concerns and fears of change. You have to take people with you on the journey, and you can’t do that without good communications skills, and processes for engaging people with the changes that will affect them. ”
PFM: “How has the office interiors industry adapted to changes in the workplace?”
Ann: “A lot of the change we have seen has of course been design led, so innovation in design has helped stimulate that change. But when businesses look for help with a planned change programme, they are often seeking a single solution, someone who can move the office, plan the move programme, design the space, supply the furniture, manage the utilities, fit-out the new office, move or install servers and desktops, even manage the filing systems, and of course work with the staff on the implementation of the changes. Generally speaking, specialists in office design and furniture supply have not found it as easy as the removals industry to evolve their offer to combine all these capabilities.
“It’s been interesting to see how Harrow Green’s business has changed in parallel with the evolution of the workplace. Moving is for those relocating a complete change of environment. So Harrow Green’s hands-on experience of moving people has led them into the development of a wider project management role. They saw the opportunity to design and build the spaces people are moving into, and to source furniture across the whole supply base. If you’re moving the whole office you need the skills to move IT as well, and engineers to rebuild the IT infrastructure. So their technology division grew out of business relocation, and similarly offsite records management grew out of the more traditional warehousing and inventory management services they provided as a major commercial removals company.”
PFM: “Where are we heading?”
Ann: “There’s a lot of research and advice on the workplace to draw on, but do we have anyone who stands out from the crowd as Frank Duffy did back in the nineties? Do we lack an office interiors ‘guru’ to predict the future? If we do, maybe that’s because the future is already here. We’ve gone through the revolution. But I think there is still some way to go before we find the right balance between flexible, mobile working and ‘going to the office’.
“There are still questions, perhaps, about what an office space is ‘for’, and what that means for management style and employer/employee elationships. That’s one of the main questions raised in the recently published report produced by BIFM and Leesman*, about remote working and flexible work patterns will increasingly affect workspace design and management style. Incidentally, the report did also conclude that companies recognise the value of the workplace as an asset, and the contribution professional FMs play in this period of transition, so that’s reassuring news for your readers.
“If anything, the role of the FM will increase in importance as companies seek to attract and retain staff and provide more facilities, like gyms, showers, and recognise the importance of the office environment as a positive contribution not only to productivity but to a balanced and managed lifestyle for all employees.
Ann Inman’s consultancy, Echo Marketing works with Harrow Green, and she has also worked with several workplace design and furniture companies over the years.
Energy on the Agenda
Since PFM was first published in 1986, the UK has seen a sea change in the general attitude to energy, with a greater appreciation of its global significance and a stronger commitment to managing it more effectively. Energy was unlikely to even be considered at board level 25 years ago and maintenance was focused on keeping plant working with no real emphasis on efficiency. During this same period we have seen building managers evolve into the highly sophisticated and specialised role of FM and are now seeing FMs take on a more significant role in energy management.
From an energy point of view, 1986 was quite a significant year. It was declared Energy Efficiency Year by the Government and the 1986 Energy World exhibition in Milton Keynes attracted interest from all over the globe. This was also the year that the UK gas industry was privatised.
However, it was the oil crises of the 1970s that set the scene for the energy scenario that existed by the early to mid-1980s. In 1973, for example, global oil prices were soaring and a work to rule by coal miners depleted coal reserves , causing coal prices to rise as well.
These events had a major impact on electricity generation and for the first three months of 1974 the Government imposed a three day working week in an attempt to reduce energy consumption. The 1970s also saw severalgovernment-led campaigns designed to educate people about energy and encourage them to minimise their use of it.
A second oil crisis followed in 1979, when oil prices rose to what was then a staggering 30p per litre and triggered a wide-ranging move away from oil as the primary fuel for heating.
Gas became the preferred option. Coal enjoyed a resurgence in popularity and people began looking seriously at straw and other biomass fuels as well.
Another highly influential event in the 1970s was the introduction of VAT in 1973. While this didn’t affect VAT-rated businesses unduly, many professions were not VAT-rated and suddenly found their maintenance bills increase significantly. However, if the maintenance was linked to an energy management contract, the maintenance services were zero-rated for VAT.
Thus the concept of energy management as part of a maintenance contract gathered pace and became a cost-effective option for many companies.
During the mid to late 1970s, contract energy management (CEM) also started to emerge, with contractors guaranteeing energy consumption for end users and assuming the financial risk of any over-consumption. These CEM contracts were mostly aimed at industrial and some larger commercial users and tended to be linked to very long-term contracts — as much as 25 years. This gave CEM a somewhat negative image and it wasn’t until the late 1970s that more innovative companies came to the market offering contracts as short as five years.
Energy then generally focused on heating and it is only relatively recently that attention has broadened to encompass the electrical consumption for other services such as ventilation, air conditioning and lighting.
As well as improving their thermal performance, buildings have become increasingly sophisticated since the early 1980s, requiring a more technical approach to maintenance. Prior to this most building maintenance was sketchy, much of it carried out by building services contractors as an addon to their core installation work. The best examples of maintenance in those days came from public sector organisations such as the NHS, the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) and the Property Services Agency (PSA). This higher-level maintenance gradually spread to commercial buildings. Managing agents also found they could reduce costs and improve service delivery by employing multiskilled maintenance staff rather than managing scores of specialist sub-contractors.
In parallel, there was increased awareness of the relationship between energy efficiency and effective maintenance. As a result, the more enlightened companies began to see maintenance as a way of improving efficiency and reducing energy costs, as well as ensuring the plant didn’t break down. For example, routine maintenance the efficiency of a boiler could be increased from 65 percent to nearer 90 percent. Nevertheless, very few of these contracts included energy performance as a KPI and this is still the case.
Purchasing power
In the early 1990s, the deregulation of the energy markets took the focus away from efficiency for a while. Following the privatisation of gas markets in 1986 and electricity markets in 1990, it became possible to reduce energy bills through procurement, rather than by managing consumption. In recent times the more sophisticated purchasing of utilities has meant there is very little cost variance across the suppliers. Consequently, controlling energy consumption is again the most important factor.
This situation underlines the fact that even in the 1990s the main driving force behind energy efficiency was to reduce costs, with most organisations paying little regard to the environmental impact of energy consumption. Thus, as a company offering energy management services, our focus as this time was on the cost savings that could be achieved through efficient monitoring and targeting, combined with maintenance regimes that optimised energy performance.
By the beginning of the 2000s, the use of fossil fuels was being linked to carbon dioxide emissions and terms such as ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ were entering common parlance. The 2000 Building Regulations introduced the idea of Low or Zero Carbon (LZC) technologies in Approved Document L (Conservation of Energy) and these regulations and subsequent updates have proved effective in ensuring new buildings were designed to higher energy performance standards.
In 2001 the Government introduced the Climate Change Levy (CCL), in an attempt to encourage energy efficiency through financial penalties. In reality, the CCL did little to encourage investment in energy efficiency. Subsequently, Energy Performance Certificates, Display Energy Certificates and the more recent Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme (CRC EES) have all sought to drive energy and carbon emissions higher up the agenda, with varying success. In 2008 the formation of the Department of Energy and Climate Change clearly signalled the Government’s awareness of the links between the two.
Importantly, these latter initiatives have also focused more attention on existing building stock, as this is where the war against emissions will be won and the Government’s emissions targets met.
As a result, there has been another change in emphasis — from energy to carbon — with many incentives to introduce low carbon technologies for heating and electricity generation. And the introduction of Feed In Tariffs and the Renewable Heat Incentive change the return on investment calculations so that investment in such technologies becomes easier to justify from a commercial point of view.
Interestingly, there is also a move to wider use of district energy systems, where a central energy centre serves a number of buildings with hot and chilled water and electrical power.
Large district energy schemes — such as those that we manage in Birmingham and Southampton – have been in existence for many years. Our latest scheme is the Olympic Park and Stratford energy centres in London.
District energy schemes provide the perfect vehicle for exploiting the benefits of newer energy technologies, because once the infrastructure is in place any technology can be used to generate the heat and power. These schemes also provide ‘demand side ‘generation of electricity through the CHP plant, now also part of the Coalition Government’s energy strategy
This trend has great significance for FMs, as responsibility for the operation and maintenance of central plant switches from individual buildings to the operator of the energy centre. Nor are these opportunities limited to new build situations as existing systems can also be easily linked to district energy schemes where the infrastructure exists.
So, we now have a situation where, slowly but surely, just about every organisation is being forced to look at its energy consumption. It doesn’t really matter if the motive is financial, environmental or being ‘seen to be green’ as long as the end result is improved energy efficiency. Government is demanding a 25 percent reduction in energy consumption across its estate .This will be achieved by good energy management and initiatives such as the REFIT program.
FMs have become increasingly involved in energy management and are often expected to have some expertise in driving down energy consumption while also ensuring compliance with legislation.
However, too few organisations are setting energy performance/carbon KPIs for their maintenance providers. In our experience, the majority of enquiries either make no reference at all to energy, or only make a vague reference to it. Yet, the maintenance service provider is ideally placed to monitor energy consumption and deliver the solutions necessary to improve it. The last 25 years may have laid the groundwork for a lower carbon future but it is only through the efforts of FMs and their service providers that our emissions targets will be met.
Software for Hard Facts
The story of CAFM’s evolution over the last 25 years dynamically reflects the adoption and acceptance of IT as a business tool in the enterprise. It charts the shift from mainframe computing to the arrival of the PC in the workplace, client/server architectures and the spread of Windows, followed by the Internet and fully web-enabled applications that take the benefits of the software direct to the end-user.
Although it had been around in its earliest form since the1960s, by the time FSI arrived on the scene in 1987, CAFM software was still seen by most people as a mechanical or engineering solution for a niche — and often hidden — facilities management function. FSI’s CAFM platform, ConceptTM, was itself born out of a requirement to take feeds from basic BMS systems, riding in on the growing demand for Computerised Maintenance Management
Systems (CMMS).
Its gradual absorption of a comprehensive range of other hard and soft FM services and its metamorphosis into a user-focused, modular package, breaking through sequential barriers of perception facilitated by each generation of technology, has underpinned the rise of FM itself as a business-critical function that is still embracing new areas, from energy and portfolio management applications to room booking and catering facilities.
A quarter of a century ago, desktop technology was still the preserve of larger organisations — technology-based and blue chip companies who had substantial property portfolios that they were managing them themselves. An early PC in the average FM contractor’s office would have been a rare sight.
And even where there was access to a CAFM system, it would have been via a traditional code-heavy DOS front-end, with a black and white or green interface, running on the company’s expensive and mysterious mainframe computers which were probably housed in their own datacentres.
As computers shrank, software developers in corporate IT departments wrote their own CAFM systems, taking advantage of emerging office automation tools such as spreadsheets and databases, that slowly broadened CAFM’s basic reach into asset management and maintenance, and some cost management. But these systems were relatively inaccessible to all but hardcore FM users.
Systems like ConceptTM 100 — the first generation of FSI’s platform, which hit the market in the early 1990s — helped to break the mould because they were Windows-based and promised a new user experience with the possibility of opening up access to the application, and its business benefits, for the first time. The next version — ConceptTM 300 — took this a stage further but still ran on its own proprietary database, meaning that the vision of being able to pull in a variety of data from diverse sources still lay in the future.
A true client/server iteration — ConceptTM 500 and ConceptTM SQL — finally arrived towards the end of the decade, based on Windows 98, and allowed any ODBC or client/server database to be used with the platform. This meant that for the first time, a CAFM solution could claim to be a genuine ‘enterprise’ system, albeit one whose appeal was still mainly limited to the technology-aware user.
At that stage, the emphasis in corporate IT remained on the computer itself rather than the software as an operational tool, and CAFM adoption was often driven by the IT manager who saw the idea of a single application running on a server as infinitely more manageable — and cost-effective — than multiple installations of a desktop application on end-users’ PCs.
The evolution of the technology helped to effect a sea-change. As users became more computer-literate, CAFM moved out of its niche to become an application with widening business appeal, opening up a host of development and market-making possibilities for CAFM software providers. Much of this occurred organically, as easier-to-use technology encouraged contractors to request tighter integration between the CAFM platform and other core business systems.
Workflow
CAFM-skilled professionals began to emerge and take their competence with them from company to company, and the software achieved greater recognition as an operational tool for delivering, managing and monitoring a variety of FM services, rather than simply being considered a back-office technology tool.
Integrated document management and workflow capabilities, as well as real-time reporting functionality, all helped to raise CAFM’s profile as a business system that held value throughout the organisation — and all the way to the higher levels of management — rather than being the sole preserve of the FM department.
Even so, little more than a decade ago, most CAFM implementations focused on planned preventative maintenance (PPM) and Help Desk functions. But the development of workflow technology, combined with the arrival of the Internet as the model for intra- and interbusiness communication, subsequently helped to unleash a wave of business system integration potential. Today, across Europe and North America, the benefits and reach of CAFM into all areas from room booking and inventory management to post room services and temperature control are widely understood and used to make the business case for investment in CAFM technology.
As early as 2000, it was becoming clear to FSI and other leading CAFM vendors, that with the web catching on as the preferred user interface in so many organisations, a web-based approach to CAFM delivery would be the next milestone in the evolution of their platforms that give staff and remote users standardised access to software and eradication of the delays and errors associated with hybrid paper/technology processes.
As many traditional CAFM applications started moving across to the Internet, they could be joined by a host of other applications that embraced 21st century business models and — for FM service providers — afforded a real opportunity to automate portfolio management and deliver a more proactive set of services.
Hosting
Along with other software products, ConceptTM initially answered this need in 2001 with a web portal for its client/server architecture, heralding the arrival of a fully blown end-to-end webenabled platform, ConceptTM Evolution, in 2008. And with it came the opportunity to deliver the software as a hosted service, allowing clients and contractors to outsource the platform and its attendant communications and hardware requirements, and focus on the needs of their users rather than operating the technology.
There is a certain irony in this. In many ways, an FM professional from the pre-desktop era would not find the principle of a central — or hosted – system on a server, accessed by multiple users, too much of a leap for their imagination. Even the CAFM applications behave much as they used to. But of course there is a world of difference in the power and integration of the systems themselves. Higher bandwidth and the sophistication of tools now available to software developers have revolutionised CAFM. And user awareness is driving demand for ever more customisable solutions that tie in with the processes at the heart of the business, helping to bring FM into the mainstream.
This revolution was not achieved overnight. For some FM professionals, the idea of a self contained software package that sat on their own desktop and generated its own sense of ownership was very appealing. The realisation that this was simply a stepping-stone in the evolution of CAFM technology to a corporate, web-based application, occasionally incurred resistance from more technical users. There was also a challenge for software vendors who, having established a market for CAFM that stretched way beyond its original definition, had to take on board the requirements and demands of an extended, web-savvy user community with high expectations of any application they are given access to.
In this respect, the advance of technology has enabled the marketisation of CAFM, particularly when it comes to linking the benefits of the software to managing the environmental and health concerns that have risen up the agenda in the boardroom during the first decade of the 21st century. Users have taken control of the market and are feeding a constant stream of demands for increased functionality and integration back to the software vendors.
Take a smart building project, where the organisation wants to make the facilities as reactive to real-time requirements as possible. The arrival of particular personnel can trigger a chain of CAFM-enabled processes from switching on the air-conditioning and lights in pre-booked meeting rooms to finding out available space from the car park entry system.
It’s a world away from the old core functions of planned maintenance and Help Desk call management, and it’s the direct consequence of the development of integrated, workflow enabled technology.
The escalating speed of technology evolution, particularly during the last ten years, has helped CAFM software vendors to move quickly to develop intuitive front-ends for their systems, meet user’s high expectations for ease of use and seamless integration.
Twenty-five years ago, CAFM software was principally the automated enabler for the delivery of a conventional set of hard FM services. Today, thanks to the powerful arc of evolving technology, it gives FM organisations the chance to fully exploit the information that a high quality CAFM system, potentially integrated with an unlimited array of business tools. That’s a quarter of a century of real progress.
Compton Darlington is Business Development Director, at FSI (FM Solutions)
