Digital building management for healthy municipal budgets

The move away from analogue work processes is an unstoppable process with significant potential to cause upheaval. The main driver of this development is the private sector, which will already have invested 40 billion euros in digitisation by 2020 according to a representative survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). However, given the right conditions, the public sector can also make just as a big a contribution to more streamlined structures and greater process efficiency. One focus of digitisation in local government is, of course, public administration. According to a study by the GfK consumer research institute, German municipalities that have designed their own special digitisation strategy identified administration as the area with the greatest efficiency potential (over 90 percent), followed by the education and transport sectors. A significant and costly factor within municipal administration is building management, as public institutions remain the largest holder of real-estate portfolios in the country. This includes buildings, monuments, streets and squares.

With its 210,000 inhabitants, Mainz is a medium-sized German city. Its location in the Rhine-Main metropolitan region and status as the state capital of Rhineland-Palatinate have resulted in economic growth and an increase in population over the past few years. This has brought with it an expansion of the municipal real-estate portfolio. Buildings owned by the city range from schools, museums, sports halls and government headquarters to swimming pools and fire stations. Residential buildings are the responsibility of the city’s housing company. Building management in Mainz is responsible for around 600 properties with a total gross floor area of 725,000 square metres. Since the beginning of 2016, alongside conventional facility management services, their tasks have also included planning and managing construction and implementation of new buildings and modernisation measures. Each year, management costs of 49.5 million euros are incurred, and an investment volume of 160 million euros is planned until 2018. The city’s real estate is thus one the largest items of municipal spending.

Requirements of municipal building management

As part of a process initiated by the German Association of Towns and Municipalities around the year 2000, the digitisation of real-estate management began with inventory taking. Categorising and assigning an individual ID to each property is the basic foundation of every digitisation process. To achieve a meaningful data inventory, it is then necessary to document every property-related procedure and to merge the information collected via different channels in a central IT system. The volume of information resulting from the pooling of energy measurement data, user notifications, maintenance measures and the like makes it essential to have a separate ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system independent from other areas of municipal administration. This applies regardless of whether building management takes place in a local government department or a municipal company. Four out of five municipal companies rely on an external service provider when setting up and networking an ERP system and the associated planning software. Since 2007, the city of Mainz has been working together on real-estate management with PROMOS consult, a Berlin-based company that specialises in SAP® systems for real-estate-related applications. The software solution library PROMOS.GT provides individual modules that can be selected depending on the specific requirements and packaged in a standardised layout that meets the corporate design guidelines.

Digital building management must meet two main criteria if it is to result in an effective reduction of workload and costs: transparency in the sense of complete documentation of the processes connected with the property and intuitive usability for seamlessly assigning tasks to new employees. After all, the software users include not only those from the city administration’s specialist department, but also the responsible employees on site, such as caretakers or school secretaries. Tablets are used for data transfer between the property and the central IT system. Orders are sent to inboxes via push notification, and the property-related data is synchronised to the ERP and mobile devices.

Uwe Hehl, head of the DL-Management business division in the building management sector of the city of Mainz

Specific fields of application

Due to the comparatively smaller number of tenants in municipal building management, the functional locations usually associated with tenants in SAP^® real-estate solutions correspond to the respective property. With a standardised ticket workflow established in 2015, orders from various sources are processed using the same pattern. Predefined subject categories are available for the various requests. Thus, all connected employees can create tickets with easysquare workflow for defect reports received by phone, e-mail, letter or in person via the FM Process Cockpit. Following this, the “parent process” – the fault notification – is triggered. This process is assigned to a specific category and is already in the digital property record. The step that follows this makes a distinction between internal and external execution. This requires that the service providers such as trade companies are also linked with easysquare. In a third step, the contract award can be revised or delegated to further service providers. Thanks to the integration of service providers, an immediate cost calculation of the upcoming work can be produced based on the stored framework contracts. Every employee has their own personal work basket showing pending tasks ordered by priority and deadline. From the start of the process until it is completed, the current work status is displayed in the form of a traffic light and the name of the employee responsible is also shown.

The history of the property can be seen via links within the Process Cockpit. As well as the master data, which cannot be modified, contract documents, completed maintenance measures, user correspondence and invoices can be viewed. Relevant legal provisions can also be stored. According to a study by Rödl and Partner in 2012, they consist of 2,000 regulations for public sector facility management alone. With a keyword search, the required information for the object can quickly be filtered out.

The tablet provides crucial support

It is obvious that most processes relating to a property originate on site. Equipping all property managers with a tablet is therefore essential. With the mobile forms designed for GWM in the easysquare mobile app, it is now possible to document damage or meter readings using the tablet camera and send them to the central ERP system where the data is added to the property record. One of the most important activities in the property is energy monitoring. Modern sensors help to create precise data on heating and air conditioning use or electricity consumption. There is a lot of potential to be leveraged here in terms of the “Internet of Things”, but the key is data collection on site including immediate integration into the property record without any interface issues. The native app developed by PROMOS also works offline. An Internet connection is only required when it comes to sending the data to the central system. The entire easysquare platform is protected by a firewall and the data transfer from the mobile device is encrypted using HTTPS.

Municipalities should overcome current concerns regarding extensive digitisation of their services. According to GfK information from 2016, these concerns include low prioritisation (75 percent of the municipal managements surveyed) and the lack of expertise within their own administrative department (70 percent). Just like every innovation, implementing supporting software involves investing time and money. However, the profitability of these investments can become evident after just a short time. The wealth of centrally available data detailing the requirements and the efficiency of use provides a secure foundation for decisions on redesigns to make better use of space, energy-saving renovations, refurbishment or divestments. Digitisation must make workflows easier for employees. Here, we recommend teaming up with specialist partner companies who will configure their solutions individually based on customer requirements, take care of installation and maintenance and hold training sessions to ensure user integration at an early stage. Active, ongoing involvement of the employees in the digitisation process also remains essential after the software launch phase. Their feedback, ideas and suggestions for improvement are key to better adapting the product. Due to the variety of parties involved, municipal digitisation strategies in the real-estate sector are inevitably team processes between the IT and Finance departments, all the users and the service providers.

Text first published in Immobilien & Finanzierung, issue 05/2017