The Customer
This multi-decade innovator in healthcare technology focuses on developing advanced medical technology solutions to improve the health of patients suffering from some of the most life-threatening conditions in over 100 countries.
The Challenge
In 2016, the organization had been using FMS:Workplace for five years at a number of its largest locations for space management and optimization. When the team was reviewing the current FM:Systems solution to ensure it was still in alignment with their broader and more centralized strategy, they found several different approaches were being used by each location. This inconsistent system of data collection made it difficult to understand the real value of the organization’s real estate portfolio, and how they could best configure each space for maximum utilization going forward.
“I’ve worked with competing workplace management solutions for more than 10 years and what I’ve seen with FM:Systems is that it’s suite of products are really user-friendly. We are able to collect useful insights quickly, and anything beyond its initial configuration can be done easily.”
-Project Management Professional, Global Healthcare Technology Company
The Solution
For the organization, it was really important to establish a concerted approach to more effectively leverage a workplace management solution that would drive better decisions around improving the performance of their facilities and organization’s cost avoidance efforts. While surveying other competing products, FM:Systems outweighed the others for many reasons. “FM:Systems was actually scalable, which would allow us to incrementally grow or expand in the future. The other solutions were heavily coded and pretty locked down. I knew we would’ve pigeon holed ourselves, had we gone with another company’s products. Secondly, FM:Systems was more economically priced – on top of already being more flexible and robust in capabilities.”
Both of these considerations helped reassure the organization and senior leadership team that FMS:Workplace was still the right one for the organization. “In fact, during this process we realized FM:Systems was an under the radar world-class company that competes directly against major household workplace management names, like IBM’s TRIRIGA.”
“…we realized FM:Systems was an under the radar world-class company that competes directly against major household workplace management names, like IBM’s TRIRIGA.”
-Project Management Professional, Global Healthcare Technology Company
The Results
Accurate Understanding of their Space Capacity and Assets across all Buildings
Today, the organization uses FMS:Workplace across a growing 23 sites, which makes up 52 buildings and over 9.7 million square feet of managed space. With a single, centralized system in place tracking 940%+ buildings from just 5 years earlier, the organization now gets full visibility into how their workspaces are performing, with the additional advantage of understanding how to allocate the cost of their facilities to all of their users.
“Because we are multi-functional and multidivisional, we wouldn’t have been able to effectively reconfigure all of these spaces in a smart way, without FMS:Workplace. We probably would’ve used AutoCAD to update spaces, which would’ve been very arduous, people-intensive and about 75-80% more time to complete. With FM:Systems, we can access data to inform decisions in a matter of minutes!”
Moreover, the system’s dashboards and reports have helped the organization in better understanding how long an open service request has been available on the system. “We aim to keep requests within 10 days from open to close and no more than 30 days for preventative maintenance requests. With FMS:Workplace, we are now able to measure how often these requests happens and can quantify them with a range between red, blue and green to tell the story – not necessarily how well or not well their teams are doing, but more so how they’re doing as a company in terms of servicing those locations.” Between those common requests and equipment maintenance, understanding the lifecycle of capital equipment and rate of service for infrastructure or systems has helped the organization prioritize investments more strategically for the short and long-term.
Easy to Implement and Fast Adoption
Although the organization created company-specific training slides on FMS:Workplace for new users, they noticed most onboarded sites never needed formal, supplemental training to get started and operate beyond the initial communication and permissioning. “This speaks volumes to the ease and scalability of the solution. By reducing even just the amount of clicks needed to pull a report within a module, is a tremendous time-saver. FMS:Workplace makes it really easy for a power user and end-user to gain permissions and access information quickly – both of which are a great benefit to us. I use it almost every day.”
The organization also recalls how any time a site was onboarded, either because of acquisition or because the organization built a new facility, all users found the transition using the FMS:Workplace solution has been seamless. “They appreciate the way that data interacts with each other, but also how it’s organized and modeled, depending on the module they’re using. They value the ability to generate their own report as a power user and the ease of seeing the status of service requests for facility management. When folks are able to focus on their core jobs and get information they need, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of room to complain.”
Ability to Confidently Refocus or Rationalize Real Estate
Looking ahead, the organization is continuing to understand utilization, optimization and capacity of their space, knowing they will be accommodating different work models for a hybrid and/or remote work. Due to this, they are partnering with FM:Systems to create neighborhoods within their buildings and floors; and are working to identify a particular facility that can support growth as well as determine how they’re performing in terms of utilization.
Currently, the organization is in the initial stage of piloting a 1.5M square foot space with FM:Systems that they will be scaling over three months. Then, they will really be able to understand more granular performance and capacity metrics. “Using this FM:Systems tool will help us know cost avoidance to inform a new workplace strategy. The data to support that, will more than likely lead us to a significant cost avoidance in what we’re looking at over $100M by not having to build additional real estate for non-product and non-manufacturing distribution work-related activity. It’s going to give us global, regional, and functional insights; and help us either revise or optimize our facilities and operations within real estate.”
“Using this FM:Systems tool will help us know cost avoidance….in what we’re looking at over $100M by not having to build additional real estate for non-product and non-manufacturing distribution work-related activity.”
– Project Management Professional, Global Healthcare Technology Company
Planning a hybrid workplace strategy? Download our guide.
With a focus on balancing cost-savings and change management, this guide will help you adopt forward-thinking strategies that lay the foundation for growth into a future state that is dynamic, flexible and resilient. What’s included:
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