Adapt or Die: It’s Time to Transform

In the competitive, quickly changing world of facilities management, spreadsheets and PDFs aren’t cutting it anymore. You may have good FM processes, but chances are they’re disjointed, paper-based, and you’ve been doing them the same way since the Ice Age. 

Digitizing what you’ve always done isn’t going to help you reduce costs, improve occupant experience, or keep the C-suite happy. You need to rethink your processes with a transformative mindset.

In this article, you’ll learn the difference between digitizing and truly transforming, discover the powerful benefits of transforming your FM processes, and find 4 key steps for starting your transformation journey.

Digitizing means putting your existing paper processes into a digital format. AutoCAD is an example. 

Before AutoCAD, you had to hand draw every line in a floor plan - and heaven help you if you made a mistake, because you’d have to redraw the whole sheet. AutoCAD replaced, or digitized, hand drafting. But it isn’t an example of transformation. Why? Because AutoCAD digitizes the manual process without changing it. You still have to choose two points and draw a line between the two. It just mimics on a screen what you used to do by hand. 

Transformation, on the other hand, looks for ways to better integrate processes and actually change the way you do things. BIM and 3-D modeling are good examples.

With BIM, you don’t have to select four points on a screen to draw a wall in a floor plan. Instead, you choose a wall object and the program draws the thousands of lines needed to represent a wall for you. That’s transformational use of technology versus simply digitizing an existing process.