Data combined with analytics is driving new opportunities across multiple industries. Take for example how e-commerce providers have used customer data and targeted advertising to drive impulse purchases that represent 35% of revenues. While architects are using BIM combined with data analytics to design buildings that save 30% of energy during operations. In facilities management services, data-driven services also hold the potential to unlock new efficiencies and drive better customer outcomes.

So exactly how can a data-driven approach unlock new efficiencies? Near real-time asset data combined with fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) analytics can help services firms identify asset problems and underlying issues more quickly. These insights are highly valuable for facilities helpdesks, allowing them to dispatch the most appropriate engineers to sites and pre-brief them on the likely faults. In addition, good quality asset data from IoT sensors or asset surveys can enable service firms to deliver condition-based maintenance to focus labour on assets that truly require servicing. This ensures providers apply maintenance inventions at the right time to avoid unplanned outages. It also helps cut excessive activities such as unnecessary maintenance work, resulting in wasted labour and costs.

So why is the time right for service firms to start adopting more data-enabled services? Firstly, the pandemic has significantly strengthened the business case for new approaches to service delivery based on remote monitoring and the smarter use of labour. Secondly, the enabling technologies – IoT sensors and analytics – are hitting new points of maturity enabling service firms to adopt them more easily at better prices.

So as service firms recover from the pandemic, it is an opportune time to review the business case for moving towards a smarter and data-driven services model. Forward-thinking service firms have already used this approach to support a 20% reduction in reactive work orders, 95% accuracy in predictive maintenance calls and 3% improvement in energy usage for clients.

For more insights in applying data to drive new efficiency in facilities management services, watch Verdantix’s presentation at Accruent Partner Conference Synergy 2022.