Facility Management is a highly competitive market that combines the technical management of a building with services to the occupants. Companies in the sector must continually adapt their service offerings. Indeed, they must meet customer requirements in terms of responsiveness, traceability and quality of service.
Digital is one of the pillars of the transformation of Facility Management. Today, technicians are equipped with smartphones or tablets on site to carry out their operations. This way they obtain reliable and usable data. Tomorrow, this data combined with the IoT, will enable new services such as predictive maintenance to be offered.
This article contains 4 parts:
1- Adding value to clients' real estate assets through facility management
2- Ermeo, a "must have" for Industry 4.0
3- From theory to field experimentation
4- Promising initial feedback
1- Enhancing the value of clients' real estate through facility management
In this context, the leaders in Facility Management have been engaged for several years in a process of digital innovation. The Atalian Group thus called upon the software publisher Ermeo: "We chose Ermeo in order to offer our customers an innovative solution that enhances the value of their real estate assets thanks to more reliable and up-to-date data" explains Arthur Giavitto, Atalian's innovation manager.
2- Ermeo, a "must have" for Industry 4.0
Ermeo has designed a real digital toolbox for the maintenance technician. From its mobile application, the technician has access to all the information he needs in a format adapted to the field. His operations guide him thanks to interactive forms designed by the operational staff and his reporting is automated. This allows the technician to concentrate on higher value-added tasks. "Large companies use a lot of software for maintenance (CMMS, EDM, IoT, BI) but few of them communicate with each other, and this software is not accessible from the field," says Victor Payan, co-founder of Ermeo.
Field techs are being cut off. Indeed, they do not have satisfactory access to information to carry out their interventions effectively. Too often, they still have to report their operations on paper. Then they have to enter the information digitally into the software.
To overcome this problem, Ermeo has designed a solution that reconciles all these software packages to make the technician's life in the field easier.
3- From theory to field experimentation
The first exchanges between Atalian and Ermeo quickly led to experiments in operational conditions. The objective was to dematerialise paper-based procedures to guide technicians, structure their feedback from the field and automate their reporting.
The ermeo software has been implemented on different types of sites: the industrial site of a prestigious cosmetics brand and the site of a major tertiary ERP with an international dimension in the heart of Paris. "Despite the constraints specific to each environment, its implementation was a success at both sites: all existing processes and documents were digitized and deployed very quickly in the field. The Ermeo team was professional and available to support us in this digital transformation and to advise us on how we could optimise our operational processes," says Clémentine Gamba, Project Manager at Atalian.
4- Promising initial feedback
Thanks to its ergonomics and ease of use, the mobile application has been strongly adopted by users right from the first technical rounds: "since we have Ermeo, we have saved a lot of time, on average 2 hours a day, because we no longer have to re-enter information in the software and all the information we need is at our fingertips" explains Mickaël MARIE, maintenance technician at Atalian.
The Group's Technical Management quickly took charge of the solution's backoffice. The backoffice allows the procedures to be digitised and the field data to be analysed. "Thanks to Ermeo, we can modify the procedures for the technicians in real time. We are able to update the documentation faster and more efficiently because the needs of the field are immediately reflected," says Clémentine Gamba, project manager at Atalian.
Today, the collaboration between Atalian and Ermeo continues, notably through major joint tenders. As such, they won a project for a major player in water and waste management at the end of 2017. As a result, Ermeo will manage several thousand sites in the new year. Management by Ermeo will ensure structured and reliable reporting of operating data.
