By: Jeff Brades, VP – Marketing & Communications, Sodexo India
Track2Realty Exclusive: Professional facility management is a new way of thinking, and maybe one that will take some time for all parties to accommodate their working practices to but I firmly believe that we are asked to be on site for one simple reason – to improve the Quality of Life of those who are there.
We are hopeful that a day will come when we can clearly consider and understand how our services impact elements such as the number of cars a manufacturer makes per hour, the average stay of a patient in a hospital, the length of time an oil rig can operate without coming for refurbishment and many, many more considerations that are ultimately far more meaningful than the rate we pay for our mops and buckets.
Our initial forays are encouraging, already we have been able to start looking at our offers for activities such as waste management and energy management and consider them from the perspective of the true benefit they bring.
Clients are willing, and indeed once the penny has dropped are driving us, to consider what this means in the real world and to implement even the most simple versions of the methodology.
Of course, it requires two parties – sometimes more – who are able to approach the conversation in a true spirit of partnership and also requires a company that is confident enough in its own expertise to tie its relationship to such a model.
That is not always possible to find, as some clients are still in the second wave of thinking, and far fewer than many of us would want are even in the third. As for service providers, all but the most mature are simply not able to start thinking in this way.
Traditional providers may not have the infrastructure, support networks or time to step back and understand how to propose this to a client. One element, which is absolutely essential to this way of thinking, is to be able to self operate the services proposed under this model as it is nigh on impossible to go on this journey with an army of sub-contracted vendors who do not have the wherewithal to trust not only the client but also their contractor without feeling they are simply stuck in the middle and squeezed from all sides.
It will take time, not everyone will want to go on the journey and many of those will not survive it. But unless we do it, we will not be able to break free of the shackles that many of us have placed on ourselves.
We need to give ourselves the freedom to be what we want to be and that should be an exciting and hugely motivating prospect for an industry that only a few years ago was at risk of finding itself a commoditized and unloved element of the new India.
