Property Managers

Contractor-inclusive portal

Property owner’s or asset manager’s need for information is constantly increasing. Last but not least, portfolios are audited for ESG, internal compliance checks are becoming more complex, due diligence is taking a close look at the state of building systems, and operational issues are increasingly being incorporated into risk analyses. Manually compiled documents covering the evaluations, receipts and logs needed are reaching their limits. In addition, clients’ willingness to log into contractor’s CAFM portals or to deal with details in general is disappearing – there is simply not enough time for the diversity of day-to-day business. The different needs of facility management, property management and asset management lead to different requirements: Higher reviews in the form of traffic light reports are required in order to get a quick, human overview; the most granular data possible, on the other hand, is needed to automate as many tasks as possible in the first place in order to free up people.

PropOps, or rather its underlying cloud infrastructure, is connected directly to FM contractors’ CAFM systems and captures the relevant building information and process data. Then they can be standardised and evaluated in new ways and for a wide variety of application scenarios. It does not matter which contractor supplies the data. In the end, what counts is the data content and the knowledge gained through processing.

Each contractor can continue to work with their own CAFM system. In this way, your contractor’s employees in the field and the subcontractors can use their familiar tools and still the partnership ultimately benefits from a uniform database in PropOps. If individual regional contractors do not yet use a CAFM system, the PropOps portal can of course be used for maintenance. In addition, open interfaces are available to connect every imaginable data source to the PropOps Cloud.

Subcontractor management

“If you act as a general contractor, you may have to employ a large number of specialised or regional contractors in order to provide the entire range of services for operating a property. The more the mechanisation of buildings advances, the more important multi-trade collaboration becomes. And that can actually only be achieved through a common, central information base.

PropOps delivers the transparency needed in processes and ensures a corresponding depth of information if a joint solution to an assignment is needed. But it also provides you with an overview so you do not to get lost in a sea of details. The same applies to your subcontractors: You decide which subset of orders a subcontractor should have access to for which property within which contracts with which contractor.”

Portfolio and property onboarding

“Often, new properties added to the property owner’s portfolio must be recorded in a First Picture by the contractor on site. If everyone uses their own, growing database and has their own way of compiling information, the overall picture can only be compiled through great manual effort and loss of information. PropOps offers the portals and the cloud infrastructure to enable contractors to work on a single database – thereby giving a common home to the information obtained on systems, documents, logs and images from the very beginning.

The transfer of data from external systems proves to be just as laborious. PropOps has gained a lot of experience in connecting to CAFM and other systems in recent years. Often, even with small amounts of data, it pays to take destiny in your own hands and arrange a digital data transfer.”
Standardisation in FM
“Inevitably, attempts to standardise infrastructure and technical facility management are increasing. And that doesn’t just mean DIN (Industry) or GEFMA (German Association of Facility Management) standards, but also attempts to standardise management within a portfolio. That is understandable, as standardisation allows for constant quality standards, contractor benchmarking and an overarching approach to system technology across the entire portfolio.

PropOps enables you to standardise your service specifications and to refer to a standard of your choice. You then decide which property is to be managed according to which service specifications and which contractor will be responsible for which part. In the same way, PropOps lets you create room and system specifications centrally or, for example, import them from an ERP system. All the relevant metadata is transferred so that when these specifications are used by your contractors, all important service information can be output at the same time.”

Operational BIM

While possible answers already exist in the design and built phase and have already been successfully tested and implemented in a wide variety of digital plans, an answer to digitisation in the run phase has yet to be found. Whatever it is in detail, an important preparatory step has already been taken by using PropOps’ robust data model or by integrating all contractor data. Your data belongs to you and all PropOps’ interfaces are available to you to increase its potential step by step.

New business models

“Digitising the property itself and building operations in particular will also have an impact on your business model. No matter if a service request is generated from cleaning and maintenance plans, property managers, tenants or, in the end, even sensors – robust, contractor-inclusive infrastructure such as PropOps is required. Thanks to global service catalogues and site and system registries, jobs can be assigned to the right contractor on site with no further human intervention and their progress automatically monitored. Using sensors and PropOps leads to highly-anticipated cleaning-on-demand or predictive maintenance services.

This also paves the way for automating less complex tasks by using service robots. Once noisy infrastructure activities such as vacuuming or scrubbing floors can be postponed into the night hours with no human intervention, day cleaning plans can finally celebrate a comeback during the day for a variety of reasons. Whatever the future looks like in detail – a robust, scalable cloud to which all stakeholders have access at any time will form the foundation for new business models.”