Corporate Real Estate Managers

A digital image

In corporate real estate, data and its use are gaining importance. Just as BIM has fought for its place in planning and development, building operations will not be able to avoid digital imaging. PropOps obtains the necessary information on your behalf directly from your FM contractor. They are out and about every day in your offices, production facilities, industrial plants and logistic centres and know best about the condition of the technical systems installed. You can either let your in-house service organisation and your external contractors document activities directly in the PropOps Cloud, or your contractors are already using their own CAFM system. If the latter is the case, it can be linked directly to PropOps via interfaces so that your contractor’s employees and subcontractors do not even have to get used to a new system. And you still benefit from centralised, contractor-inclusive data access.

Digitisation is not an end in itself!

PropOps is not a cloud just because clouds are the in-thing right now. We don’t just collect data for data’s sake either. We know that demands will continue to rise – and digitisation and a robust database can help to meet them.

Regional room for manoeuvring

The balancing act between setting standards through central asset management or merging areas into Centres of Excellence and the important decentralised functions of regional, country or site managers can only be achieved through a common platform. The information base created, the common, binding processes, and the clear communication associated with them are the key.

Your site managers can leverage the new transparency to manage their locations individually and, through ad hoc assignments, flexibly intervene in the events on site. Nevertheless, all activities are neatly logged and documented, and flow into the platform for evaluation and high-level decisions. Site and country managers are largely freed from having to document everything so they can concentrate on the tasks in the field, because data aggregation is automated via PropOps.

Global standards

It is difficult to establish FM standards across an organisation, particularly in an international context. PropOps enables you to introduce standard service specifications on global, regional or national levels, centralise site and system registries and provide standard interfaces and portals for FM contractors. The digital processes standardised with PropOps create a database for investment decisions and the work of your Centres of Excellence. In doing so, you lay the foundation for an integrated corporate real estate management system, which will certainly have to face further challenges in the coming years due your company’s dynamic business models.

Multi-trade coordination

Facility management is also seeing an increasing specialisation of trades. Particularly for manufacturing, contractors are increasingly required to have more specific skills than a general contractor can demonstrate without the need for subcontractors or, in some cases, regional specialists. Regional and specialist contractors not only mean a broader field of suppliers that need to be managed, but also a greater need for coordination between the trades themselves. A central platform such as PropOps ensures a uniform level of knowledge, information on pre- and post-work and a traceable log for systems and sites. As contractors can be seamlessly integrated into contractor processes either via PropOps’ own portals or via open data interfaces, it is possible to concentrate on the actual work in the field and the coordination needed. Your contractors are only as good as the information they are given to do their work.

Investment decisions

The value of your building and industrial systems normally increases steadily. On top of pure day-to-day business, investment activity also need to be well informed. You systems’ operating logs in PropOps, showing individual maintenance contracts and supporting documentation, give you a good foundation for decision-making or the necessary data to support a decision-making process. PropOps can be particularly helpful with annual CAPEX planning because you can have evaluations exported across company locations and contractors or just for a specific type of system. If, on the other hand, a specific system or even a single system component needs to be examined, the header data taken from the contractors’ systems, standardised maintenance logs with supporting documentation as well as any image files and written comments allow you to evaluate the necessity and degree of urgency of the upcoming measures.

Operational safety

“Legal requirements and internal company compliance requirements demand a lot from your operational property management. Even if it makes sense to transfer a large part of the operator responsibility to contractors, the automatically collated system maintenance and repair logs represent the most important part of seamless inventory and operation documentation across all locations and contractors. Upcoming contractor changes cause fewer headaches because, on the one hand, the existing data in PropOps can be built on and, on the other hand, the new contractor will also update existing documentation.

We are not talking about permanent additional work here: The data is generated through your contractor’s service anyway. It is already required today for invoicing and, sometimes, manual monthly evaluations. PropOps automatically and permanently ensures that operating documentation is constantly appended with updates to the system registry, additions to system master data, newly added maintenance processes and their status, evidence, images and comments.”