What Is On-Demand Facilities Management and What Role Can It Play?

On-demand facilities management is a special subset of an outside contractor, focused on delivering facilities management support and services in temporary and unusual circumstances. Although on-demand facilities management is typically associated with high-cost reactive maintenance tasks, that’s not always the case. Here are some benefits to consider:

Augment a Lean Internal Team

As maintenance technology continues to develop, more and more facilities are finding it easier to move from reactive maintenance to preventive maintenance, slowly working their way up to predictive maintenance. The latter is the most cost efficient ideal when it is done properly.

However, even with dedication to preventing and predicting maintenance issues, emergencies and unforeseen circumstances are certain to arise. Industry standards suggest aiming for 20 percent reactive maintenance, but the reality is that most facilities spend more like one-third to nearly one-half of resources on reactive maintenance tasks. On-demand facilities management can help you quickly ramp up your maintenance team to deal with these situations, allowing you to keep your core staff focused on their daily priorities.

Access to Flexible, Trained Professionals

According to Adecco, more than 60 percent of companies are struggling to fill skilled trade positions and nearly three-fourths of all businesses expect to face the problem in the future. As the facility management industry grapples with the labor shortage as well as with a growing skills gap, access to trained maintenance technicians in short order will become more critical.

Developing a relationship with an on-demand facilities management provider can help fill the gaps in unplanned or emergency situations.

Improve Corporate Culture

Although most maintenance technicians expect that they will have to take on a certain level of reactive or emergency maintenance tasks, too many can increase stress and dissatisfaction with a position in the long run.

For example, if a facility is moving toward preventive and predictive maintenance systems, management may promise technicians training in the high-skilled tasks such as data analytics. However, if these technicians are constantly being pulled off these types of tasks to address emergencies, there may be a negative impact on employee morale and trust in management.

An on-demand partner may be able to pick up some of the slack, giving you the opportunity to truly invest in your in-house maintenance team.