High level Summit on Real Estate and Facility Management: January 22, Mumbai

Supply Chain Management

Taking forward an important aspect of the real estate management, which is the Supply Chain Management, the next discussion focused on it, as a catalyst in FM outsourcing. Moderating the discussion S. Narayan, Founder & President, Integron started with stating that today FM companies are expected to not only maintain property but entire townships, municipal services and property management property, going beyond single building across locations. This has made the job of procuring & planning for services across multiple functions & places a complex issue. Vikas Rawat, Vice President – Operations, Nirlon Ltd pointed out that while at project stage, right material and right cost are key to procurement, at the maintenance stage, the assurance of supply and guarantee of price with minimum cost escalation over time becomes essential. Aval Sethi, Head – Supply Chain Management & Procurement, Asia, Integrated Facility Management, Jones Lang LaSalle Property Consultants mentioned the challenge of sourcing materials from vendors across spectrum of services and satisfying clients at the same time. According to him, IT led supply chain, emphasis on sustainability & compliances, risk management with in supply chain and technology driven delivery modules are some of the latest developments. Navin Upadhyay, National Manager – Procurement & Capacity Management, Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd. added that FM has now become a specialized segment and some of the important considerations while outsourcing FM include, value for money, efficiency & optimization in manpower and materials and streamlining of facility management. The biggest challenge in FM industry remains the quality of manpower. To address the issue of skilled workers in FM, Ruediger Schroeder, Managing Director, Karcher Cleaning Systems Private Limited informed about the three-year vocational training for cleaning professionals in countries like Germany and Switzerland. If the same practices are followed in India, he feels it will bring government recognized skill sets into the industry and recognition of cleaning industry by the society at large. Comparing the international FM industry with Indian industry, he pointed out the lack of understanding of logistics and delivery process in supply chain and not giving due importance to after sales service by counterparts in India.

Need for regulating FM

A very critical subject for the realty and facility management industry is the need for an FM industry regulator. The last discussion of the day revolved around the pros and cons of having such a regulatory body. Sasidhar Chidanamarri, Associate Director, Energy & Environment Practice, Frost & Sullivan moderating the discussion questioned, that given the 24% growth rate of the FM industry and presence of more than 300 players both organized and unorganized does the industry need a regulatory body or rating system of FM companies as followed in China, S. Korea and Japan or UAE system where Middle East FM association has partnered with Dubai real estate regulatory body to develop codes and standards. Shamsher Sindhu, Head – Infrastructure and Projects, Kotak Mahindra Bank expressed that companies are already following voluntary regulations guidelines of organizations like BIFMA and IFMA, even client SLAs are a set of parameters so, some standard regulations may make a difference but instead of an external body, industry professional own body can collaborate with government agencies in terms of planning and development of buildings, towns and cities. Nakul Subramanyam, Executive Director, Morgan Stanley Advantage Services Pvt Ltd pointed out that FM is a B2B industry and defining what to regulate and how to regulate is a challenge. Some areas of facility management need regulating and classification of FM companies’ can give a formal structure to the industry. Adding to Nakul statement, Rohit Dalal, Head – Logistics, Housing & Real Estate, Atos (India) said that there is an ambiguity in defining what needs regulating – the individual, activity, output or impact of the industry. Instead, addressing the shortage of skilled work force in the industry is more important. “In FM, rather than academic qualification, skillset of an individual is more crit
ical which should be recognized and validated as a first step toward creating certification programs for FM industry professionals” he expressed. Rajesh Pandit, Managing Director, Global Workplace Solutions, CB Richard Ellis – Asset Services – India felt that the building industry from planning to managing stage had enough regulations already. Simultaneously, on operations side, quality control and ISO offer regulations. He felt that instead of creating another regulatory mechanism, the users and service providers could come together to support institutes offering certification programs for FM professionals to create skilled workforce which in itself will take care of quality services.

Improving Building Performance

After the highly engaging and interactive discussions, an interesting presentation by Mili Majumdar, Senior Director, Sustainable Habitat Division, TERI drew the attention of the delegates towards benchmarking strategies to improve building performance. She briefed, “Globally, buildings have a large resource footprint in terms of energy, water and pollution and FM can positively influence resource guzzlers sectors like offices, commercial, retail and hospitality. GRIHA, the benchmarking and performance rating system rates the building only when it performs and this where the facility management role becomes crucial. Building performance is linked with resource saving without compromising on comfort. Such as setting set-points in HVAC to acclimatize the temperature as per the requirement, occupancy or other benchmarks. Interestingly, a rated building with all the compliances may not perform well because of the faulty operations & maintenance. The FM managers in many cases do not have drawings and other documents to know the design considerations of the equipment and thus may be running them at incorrect operating levels leading to poor performance of the building. For instance, sometimes VRV system is bypassed by the operator defeating the whole purpose of implementing energy efficient HVAC system.” Her inquiry from the FM industry representatives if they gave concession to energy efficient buildings or charged more to maintain these buildings featuring advanced building systems, led to an animated debate among the delegates.

Workplace Strategies to enhance productivity

The workplace strategy has assumed a new meaning and importance in modern workspace. Highlighting the same, Shail Gala, Associate Director, Project Management, DTZ elaborated on the strategies for change management that should be adopted for smooth transition in an organization. According to Shail, Hot desking, agile working, activity based working, telecommuting are the new words of workplace strategy as real estate has become the top most cost factor for many companies. “In most offices, the space requirement is based on either headcount, corporate standards, space efficiency, budget or organizational flexibility. In any office, there is at least 12% vacancy at any given time. The same can be reduced by accommodating more persons, making staff more productive through comfort & collaboration and by providing organizational agility i.e. working from anywhere. But, this requires training people and offering them choices. For instance, offices can be designed with home zones or fixed spaces for certain departments, shared spaces for collaborative work, seats in the coffee shop for relaxed working and some private areas so employees can choose the place to occupy depending on the work they are doing,” he said.

Explaining the FM role in change management, he stated “To adapt the staff to new regimen, change management has to be implemented at many levels which includes, leadership approval, workshops and discussions with employees at all hierarchy, enabling staff acceptance and empowering operational teams. FM changes too, as it now has to provide hotel like service where the person coming after should get clean desk with no signs of earlier user, round the clock cleaning, stocked pantry etc. Strict policy enforcement for all and security of employee possessions, become critical factors too in shared spaces. Thus, change has to be well supported by FM to succeed.”

Talking about the impact of technology in workplace, Sreedhar Saraswathi, Business Head – South Asia, ARCHIBUS spoke about the new systems and innovations that were driving FM globally and in India. He explained the concepts of CAFM and BIM used as foundation for FM systems, now known as TIFM- Total infrastructure & facility management and IWMS – Integrated workplace management system. “These help allocate, enable, optimize and preserve the resources. In fact, during building lifecycle of 30 years, FM contributes up to 34% of operational saving. Additionally, GIS, cloud computing, mobile apps, social media and virtual reality & augmented reality have become great tools for FM,” he added.

Mind games for the audience

The summit ended with an exciting session by motivational speaker Pradip Amladi of Mynd Storm. The highpoint of his session was the magic tricks that conveyed the personality development messages in a lift hearted manner. His thought provoking games not only energized the delegates after the long day of deliberations, but also left everyone with some inspirational concepts that could be followed in personal and professional lives for more fruitful outcome.

In all, the delegates found the sessions beneficial and the topics relevant. For some, the summit provided the opportunity to network with FM professionals and industry experts, for others, the discussions and presentations offered insight in the key areas of facility management. As one of the delegates from Germany put it, “The IFM Summit was a valuable opportunity to meet the relevant stakeholders in the FM industry. It was good to learn about the business side of our industry as well as the technical challenges.”

Delegates Speak

We are very impressed about the high level speakers at the summit, again congratulation for organizing such wonderful event.

The sessions were quite informative and rele
vant. But I particularly liked the session on “Relevance of Infrastructure and FM to the core business” chaired by Jairam Panch. We look forward to many more sessions/ seminars in the forthcoming shows.

The IFM Summit was a right platform to meet and interact with the important stakeholders in the FM industry. The summit/seminar was enlightening with the finest speakers who could do the justice to the topics. The panel members covered extensively on every subjects in the field of maintenance and services related to buildings.

“Excellent sessions revealing today’s challenges of FM and the only way to improve efficiency – closer cooperation amongst the stakeholders.”

It’s one of the best professionally managed and conducted summits. Looking forward for forthcoming events organised by you

The Summit was concluded thanking to the partners: Knowledge Partner-Cushman & Wakefield, Platinum Partner- Alfred Karcher GmbH, Gold Partner-Roots Multiclean Ltd and Silver Partners: Clean Care, Sanjay Maintenance Services Pvt Ltd and HPC (Hygiene and Personal Care).