Facilities Management Middle East
A YEAR INTO THE PANDEMIC
How the integration of technology has contributed to Emrill’s success?
It has been over a year since the global Covid-19 pandemic began. During this time, organisations have adapted to navigate the resulting challenges and uncertainties. Governments worldwide have taken action to curb the spread of the virus, assisted by health authorities and medical providers, who leapt into action to provide vital services, including tests, vaccinations and critical care for those who needed it. Education providers ensured students could continue learning with the provision of remote virtual learning. Organisations assisted their employees in the transition to working from home. Throughout the pandemic, facilities management providers have been among the unsung heroes, supporting government sterilisation programmes, minimising the risk of infection and working on the frontlines to ensure residents and visitors have remained safe.
In many ways, the global pandemic has forced organisations to assess their operations critically. Experience has taught us that any disruptive event, especially one as significant as a pandemic, will impact business operations and how we provide services to clients. In the facilities management sector, we have been faced with the challenge of ensuring the services we deliver support the government’s efforts to contain the risk of Covid-19 spreading further. In some cases, this has been achieved through the provision of tailormade services, such as the deployment of additional staff and specialised fogging equipment to sanitise the communities we work in, including Emirates Living, Arabian Ranches and Downtown Dubai to support the UAE authorities’ national sterilisation programme. However, much of what Emrill has done over the last twelve months has been more an adaptation and evolution of services rather than launching new services.
For example, pre-pandemic, the way we treated a door handle in a school may have been different from the way we treated a door handle in a healthcare environment. This is because the risk of an infection in a hospital is usually far more significant than anywhere else. However, as a result of Covid-19, we are applying the same cleaning regimes, including methodology and frequency, we would traditionally use in a healthcare environment in other sectors, such as education, residential, retail, logistics, hospitality and airports. As one of the first FM providers in the region to be awarded BICSc membership, Emrill was well-positioned to apply these methodologies across all sectors.
Emrill has always been committed to innovation and giving its clients access to the latest technology and equipment. How we launched and integrated new technology has played an important
role in the company’s response to the pandemic. From the outset, we had a couple of goals in mind. We wanted to lessen contact between employees, reducing the physical contact they had with each other where it was not essential. We also wanted to empower our technicians to deliver services more effectively out in the field. However, above all else, we needed to ensure that whatever solutions we put in place would ultimately increase efficiency and add value to our clients, giving them confidence that we were doing everything possible to ensure the safety of their community residents and building occupants.
Expanding on Emrill’s existing efficiency-enhancing app, which increases the efficiency of housekeeping and soft facilities management service delivery, we launched a web and mobile-based app for technicians in the field. This app enables them to log faults, upload photographs and raise queries, so they can work through a checklist of actions to be resolved and completed. Via their mobile devices, technicians can also access all assetrelated information, including manuals, references, contact information for special, approved services providers and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) diagrams. The use of the app has minimised the need to call out an additional team to fix issues on-site and has reduced the time spent looking for asset-related data, freeing technicians to carry out other works. As the app captures all of the data, we have also eliminated the need to prepare paperbased work orders by up to 100 per cent on several sites. This process is good for the environment, saving travel time and decreasing paper waste, and for our employees, who have less non-essential contact with others.
Emrill has also expanded the capabilities of its CAFM platform, FSI Go, to further decrease the requirement for Emrill’s technicians to visit site offices, thereby minimising any unnecessary contact with team members. Previously, technicians would log jobs, and these would be closed-off when completed by the administrative team. Now, to ensure optimum usage of the CAFM mobile apps, technicians can access FSI Go on their mobile devices and can log, update and close jobs without leaving the site. Again, this has reduced the need to share paper-based documents and face-to-face contact, but it has also improved accuracy and increased efficiency by approximately 10-20 per cent.
Not all of the innovations Emrill launched during the pandemic have focused on reducing the need for Emrill’s technicians to come into contact with their colleagues. In a premier horizontal community in Dubai, we have implemented geofencing to optimise waste management. Each villa is geofenced in the system, so when the waste collection technician enters a villa’s vicinity to empty the garbage bins, his mobile device notifies the system he has visited that property. This data is uploaded in real-time, so if a villa is missed, we can immediately let the waste collection team know. Since launching this system, we have received no complaints from residents about waste collection, and we have achieved this without the need to deploy an additional supervisory element.
We have also increased the application of automation to improve efficiency. For example, we have installed sensor technology on street and community lighting in the communities we manage. These sensors detect disruptions and outages, identifying which sector they have occurred in, enabling us to proactively restore power or change bulbs promptly instead of waiting to receive a complaint from residents. In the earlier manual auditing process, response to certain areas happens over 24hrs due to wide geographic coverage of the property. This is now being addressed within the hour as the notification is instantaneous, and callouts can be scheduled accordingly.
The ability of the team to detect such failures has improved customer feedback. This is especially important
to critical lights, where an outage poses a safety risk. Upon detecting an outage, the system automatically raises the alarm and puts a call into the duty technician. As a fail-safe, if this call is not answered, the system escalates the issue, calling the supervisor. Once the issue has been resolved and the current flow is restored, the alarm stops and the entire process is logged online in real-time. The implementation of automation has increased the ability of Emrill’s technicians to detect failures, which has had a direct impact on customer satisfaction and happiness. To further enhance this system, we are now trialling it for individual critical lights, in addition to sectors.
Ultimately, technology without purpose is meaningless. Before the pandemic, we recognised that it is not enough to update IT systems to react to market challenges and evolving requirements. Instead, Emrill has continued to redefine its service delivery approach completely, harnessing the potential of young, tech-savvy technicians who have shared their ideas in our Continuous Improvement Workshops and are comfortable with the expanded use of technology with the aim of being more productive rather than clocking hours on a job.