Dynamic, efficient, sustainable:
The future of facilities
management is here
The way we work has dramatically changed. Can the buildings in which we work keep up?
Facilities management is changing fast. Data on usage, energy, environment and assets is pouring into “smart building” platforms. From high-tech sensors that can see and read just like people do, to AI-powered tools that make cost savings easier to achieve, modern innovations are enabling human experts to focus on higher-value work that maximizes safety, comfort and reliability.
At the same time, a new way of working is forcing evolution: Hybrid work has led to notable variations in occupancy. Climate change has led to fluctuating environmental conditions that are driving risk and demand response. Aging buildings and infrastructure combined with dwindling budgets have increased the need for credible data to inform investment decisions. In times of rapid change, it can be tough to keep up – without the right guidance.
According to Jim Whittaker, head of workplace products for global real estate leader, JLL, the old way of doing things — static, reactive facilities management (FM) — is no match for today’s landscape. A proactive and dynamic new approach is in order.
A dynamic approach to facilities management provides clients with data-driven insights, agility and strategy. All three of these elements are essential to keep up with things like fluctuations in occupancy, changing asset and climate conditions, and demands for safe and compliant office environments. They also help organizations get ahead, creating opportunities to fortify corporate culture, boosting talent retention and productivity, advancing sustainability goals and adapting to evolving business needs.
An urgent challenge, a new strategy
An urgent challenge, a new strategy
One of the big challenges in facilities management today is making progress on sustainability goals. According to Monique Vutla, head of sustainability products at JLL, the tone and discussions about sustainability have changed dramatically over the last few years.
“There’s been a huge shift around sustainability,” Vutla says. “In the past, organizations were focused on utility bill savings or just ‘doing the right thing.’” Today, Vutla adds, people have a greater understanding of the risks and financial impacts of climate change on their portfolios and how their facilities are managed.
With the additional research and awareness around climate change, this has “very quickly shifted from a place of philanthropy to an awareness of the very real threats to my facilities and business,” Vutla says.
Those include increased frequency of facility damage and business disruption due to extreme weather events, compliance risk due to evolving regulations, competition for talent with the emerging workforce demanding progress and rising operating/investment costs for unsustainable buildings. Building owners face fines, greater cost of capital and greater vacancy for buildings that are slow to decarbonize or for those with greater vulnerabilities to a changing climate. “And this is happening at a global level,” Vutla notes.
“Sustainability data can often be a mess,” so when Vutla’s team has this conversation with clients, she says, data — accurate, aggregated, reliable sustainability data — is the first step. Then the data must be integrated with other relevant datasets from across the real estate lifecycle so stakeholders can make new, smarter decisions. ”To reduce risk and drive value, businesses need to transform,” Vutla says. “A transformation that requires the integration of sustainability data and criteria across the entire real estate lifecycle that allows key stakeholders to make new and smarter decisions.”
Aggregated, high quality data is extremely powerful and leads to better-informed and more efficient management strategies for both assets and energy. “How we are embedding sustainability is very critical to us actually being able to implement real sustainable change within the FM space,” Vutla adds.
Having a partner like the experts at JLL who can more easily collect, clean and analyze data allows them to diagnose problems faster, and spend more valuable time prioritizing and implementing impactful solutions.
Those include increased frequency of facility damage and business disruption due to extreme weather events, compliance risk due to evolving regulations, competition for talent with the emerging workforce demanding progress and rising operating/investment costs for unsustainable buildings. Building owners face fines, greater cost of capital and greater vacancy for buildings that are slow to decarbonize or for those with greater vulnerabilities to a changing climate. “And this is happening at a global level,” Vutla notes.
“Sustainability data can often be a mess,” so when Vutla’s team has this conversation with clients, she says, data — accurate, aggregated, reliable sustainability data — is the first step. Then the data must be integrated with other relevant datasets from across the real estate lifecycle so stakeholders can make new, smarter decisions. ”To reduce risk and drive value, businesses need to transform,” Vutla says. “A transformation that requires the integration of sustainability data and criteria across the entire real estate lifecycle that allows key stakeholders to make new and smarter decisions.”
Aggregated, high quality data is extremely powerful and leads to better-informed and more efficient management strategies for both assets and energy. “How we are embedding sustainability is very critical to us actually being able to implement real sustainable change within the FM space,” Vutla adds.
Having a partner like the experts at JLL who can more easily collect, clean and analyze data allows them to diagnose problems faster, and spend more valuable time prioritizing and implementing impactful solutions.
Monique VutlaHead of sustainability products, JLL
Because with sustainability, what we say is that if we are actually gonna drive the change that is required to truly decarbonize the real estate industry, it requires that there is integration across that entire real estate lifecycle. And there are some points on that lifecycle or moments in that lifecycle that are more strategic and more critical than others and one of those is engineering. And so how you operate the building, how you're thinking about incorporating things in your maintenance schedules, the upgrades that you're doing, et cetera, have real impact. How we are embedding sustainability is very critical to us actually being able to implement real sustainable change within the FM space.
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Smart buildings, smart processes
Smart buildings, smart processes
Addressing challenges like sustainability can seem daunting when faced with common facilities management obstacles such as inefficient resource allocation, outdated reporting processes, aging infrastructure, and siloed building systems. According to Paul Morgan, CEO of workplace management at JLL, this scenario illustrates the power of JLL's dynamic approach to facilities management.
Morgan views this decision-driving data as a comprehensive "digital ecosystem" that "interconnects every phase of the real estate lifecycle, ensuring continuity and coherence" from strategy formulation to action implementation and optimization.
JLL leverages a suite of efficiency-enhancing, proprietary platforms to visualize multiple datasets in a unified framework, Morgan explains. These encompass various aspects including energy efficiency, asset health, climate risk, and space utilization, among others, interwoven to strengthen and enhance outcomes.
"By gaining real-time insights into facility performance, we're helping clients reduce costs by eliminating unnecessary maintenance work and optimizing resource allocation," Morgan elaborates. "Our proactive approach of these facilities allows us to foresee potential issues and take measures, preventing avoidable expenses and unexpected downtimes."
Addressing challenges like sustainability can seem daunting when faced with common facilities management obstacles such as inefficient resource allocation, outdated reporting processes, aging infrastructure, and siloed building systems. According to Paul Morgan, CEO of workplace management at JLL, this scenario illustrates the power of JLL's dynamic approach to facilities management.
Morgan views this decision-driving data as a comprehensive "digital ecosystem" that "interconnects every phase of the real estate lifecycle, ensuring continuity and coherence" from strategy formulation to action implementation and optimization.
JLL leverages a suite of efficiency-enhancing, proprietary platforms to visualize multiple datasets in a unified framework, Morgan explains. These encompass various aspects including energy efficiency, asset health, climate risk, and space utilization, among others, interwoven to strengthen and enhance outcomes.
"By gaining real-time insights into facility performance, we're helping clients reduce costs by eliminating unnecessary maintenance work and optimizing resource allocation," Morgan elaborates. "Our proactive approach of these facilities allows us to foresee potential issues and take measures, preventing avoidable expenses and unexpected downtimes."
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Quality data, more clarity
Quality data, more clarity
Indeed, processed, real-time data — on assets, buildings, environment and usage — is key to improved performance in facilities, better energy management and sustainability, and better employee experience.
“If we look at the overall dynamic FM world, we continually drive better performance through our real estate lifecycle framework,” Whittaker says, “which allows us to capture data once at the point of creation, building design, construction and commissioning, and use it through the life of operations and into renewal of facilities.”
Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms into the process, particularly in the asset renewal stage, he says, allows JLL to assess investments and capital allocation. “With all of the data we have on the portfolio and assets within the building including ages, replacement costs and condition, we’re able to maximize a return on investment.”
But while commercial real estate (CRE) stakeholders have never had more data at their disposal, they’ve also never had a bigger mess to untangle. “For decades we’ve had problems with data,” Whittaker explains. “When I started in this industry 30 years ago, we didn’t have the data we needed to make the right decisions. Today we have too much data, but it’s not necessarily the right data or of high enough quality to be actionable.”
“There are hundreds of thousands of sensors being installed in buildings to track dozens of use cases,” he says. “But you need to integrate all those technologies into platforms that can consume the data and contextualize it for people.”
Today, JLL experts can ingest all this information into new technologies that help clean up and process this data to trace the digital thread to actionable insights — “single pane of glass” dashboards in AI-powered platforms like JLL Smart Building Platform and JLL Serve, which enable experts to anticipate problems before they arise and inform FM.
Jim WhittakerHead of workplace products, JLL
I think it’s the real-time nature of the data. Again, we’ve got better ways of bringing in real-time data from all of our sensors, IoT, automated systems. Again, before it was overwhelming. I can remember days going into universities and their control centers, what we call NOC AROC, network operations center. You got a computer just scrolling alarms from all these sensors, and nobody knows what to do with all those alarms, et cetera. Now we’re able to make sense of all of that data in a better real-time fashion to give us better insights around the health of facilities, whether it’s environmental health or air quality or asset health and performance, or people, even wellness. So those big areas, quality, ingestion of layers, and the real-time data, I think are three big components of why data is so, and we’re investing a ton in how do we improve the quality of data, ingest that data, and drive those insights?
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Human experts on hand
Human experts on hand
Quality data and smart platforms, Whittaker says, highlight “new solutions to old problems.” But those solutions won’t be evident — or actionable — without the right experience and insight. “The result depends on having well-trained experts who can follow guidelines to make the system flexible and responsive”, he says.
Human expertise in tandem with technological innovation are pushing the FM revolution forward at JLL, turning the work from siloed, manual and complex to seamless, automated and simplified, which frees up time for higher value work and greater job satisfaction. And that transformation is paving the way for brighter visions of the future, in terms of efficiency, experience and environment.
To Whittaker, this future involves a fully realized vision of the digital twin: A world where AI and augmented/virtual reality technologies deliver the right information to the right human experts at the right time to sustain and optimize building operations for cost, comfort, compliance and sustainability.
“We’re already using technologies like these to train our technicians,” he says. “We’re able to walk into a virtual environment, select things and pull up information about the facility. As we improve our data, we’ll eventually be able to use AI and augmented reality together. This will let us see behind walls and quickly find the information we need.”
In Vutla’s vision of the future, sustainability program managers will no longer spend a large portion of their time “fighting the data.” They will have access to clean, reliable, aggregated data giving them real-time visibility into the essential information around energy, waste, water and more. This drastically reduces diagnostic cycles so that they can spend the bulk of their time on the truly valuable work of strategizing, implementing, and monitoring the projects that drive real sustainability impact.
“We need to evolve beyond the lack of data challenge to integrating key sustainability data directly into market research, location strategy, leasing, capital planning, maintenance planning, design and construction. We talk to so many businesses who want to make more sustainable decisions but can’t because they don’t have the information to do so,” she adds.
Morgan envisions the future of FM where AI and human expertise work in tandem. "We're not just implementing AI; we're reimagining the entire FM landscape," he explains. "AI is a tool for handling data-intensive, repetitive tasks, freeing our teams to focus on high-value activities that require human ingenuity – strategic planning, innovative problem-solving, and nurturing client relationships. This industry is fundamentally about people and connections. By leveraging AI, we're not replacing jobs; we're evolving them. Our goal is to create more fulfilling roles that maximize human potential in facilities management."