Innovation with integration

Ideas In Action

Innovation leading to increased productivity is the fundamental source of increasing wealth in an economy. In today's economic environment, innovation has never been more important and acceptance of it more critical. Economists tend to focus on the process itself, from the origination of an idea to its transformation into something useful and finally to its implementation. Since innovation is considered a major driver of the economy, especially when it leads to increasing productivity, the factors that lead to innovation are also considered to be critical to decision makers.

The term "innovation" means a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations and is often synonymous with the output of the process. A distinction is typically made between invention - an idea made manifest, and innovation - ideas applied successfully. In many fields, something new must be substantially different to be innovative, not an insignificant change. In economics the change must increase value, customer value, or producer value. The goal of innovation is positive change, to make someone or something better.

System integration is the process by which smaller pieces of software are brought together to form a larger piece of software designed to solve a problem.

In Facilities Management, ‘innovation' & ‘integration' are two words that should be at the forefront of our thinking. We need to change the way we think if we are to successfully ride out any possible recession and in order to do that we need to put innovative ideas into action and plan a financially sustainable approach to FM system implementation. Most organisations will already have a number of legacy systems in place and most of these systems will affect the management of the facilities in some way. There may be a Finance system which is depreciating the assets and managing the supplier accounts; there may be a BIM system offering real-time outputs on key assets; there may be a Room Booking system charging back occupancy times to the various departments - and so the list goes on. All of this information is critical, but how many organizations can gather this information together and run meaningful reports on the holistic impact of their facilities management? A Facilities Manager may not have access to some of the information, particularly that in a Financial system, and so how do they gather all the pieces of the FM puzzle together?

Innovation is the first step. Assess what systems are currently in place and which ones are working successfully for the organisation. These legacy systems should not be replaced if they give the required outputs. Rather, analyse what the missing pieces are. For example, a Financial system will depreciate your assets - helpful, but not altogether useful to a Facilities Manager who needs to manage the maintenance of these assets. In a Financial system, once the asset is depreciated, it is no longer of use and therefore deleted from the system, again not useful to the FM team who need to keep a history of assets. Therefore, an operational Asset management system may be a missing part of the FM puzzle.

Once the needs analysis has been conducted, Integration is the next step. When sourcing the new FM software options, be sure that a key capability of your new system is the ability to integrate simply with your legacy systems. This is the only way the FM Team can draw relevant information from existing systems into their own to give them a holistic view of the facilities, assets and their management. Also ensure that your new system is flexible and adaptable and the supplier is innovative in their approach. Seamlessly modular systems are the way forward, additional modules that you can grow into as your needs grow, and always follow up suppliers references to ensure they have a solid track record and are a true partner to your FM Team.

For more information on how FM Innovations can help you please contact us.