A Proven Framework for O&M Teams to Sustain a Culture of Outcomes

The traditional approach to asset performance management, operations and maintenance (O&M) is failing modern enterprise asset owners and facility management businesses.

Across asset-intensive industries like manufacturing, healthcare, data centers and commercial real estate, long-standing reactive maintenance processes coupled with outdated technology have produced sub par results at best.

As efficiency, reliability, and sustainability become of ultimate essence in the built environment, an explosion of data and smart building technology has taken the world by storm. And it has made things more complex than you might have imagined.

Outcome-oriented expectations of various stakeholders are giving rise to performance based contracts, and increasing the demand for more productive and cost-effective buildings. As a result, O&M teams face increasing pressure to:

• Reduce total cost of ownership (asset operations, repair and maintenance cost)
• Meet net zero emissions targets and portfolio sustainability goals
• Enhance occupant experience, ensure ever safer and healthier work environments

But without proper alignment and collaboration between people, process, and technology, facility managers and maintenance teams are struggling to achieve these outcomes.
If this describes your organization, it’s time to understand why your operations and maintenance teams need to leverage a comprehensive framework that promotes forward thinking, reliability in decision making, agility in execution and accuracy in tracking performance.

Four key components of an outcome-oriented framework for O&M teams:

While the obsession with RESULTS is higher than ever, it can often undermine the importance of the PROCESS.

The right operating framework can be a game changer for your organization. When you have a reliable framework in place, getting to the desired outcome becomes so much easier, and the impacts of your efforts become so much more predictable.

For O&M teams, a solid framework can help synchronize the way asset performance management and maintenance is done. While assets, facilities and the nature of work may differ from business to business, we believe there are 4 key components of a reliable framework that enable O&M teams to successfully build and sustain a culture of outcomes:

Discover: Proactively identify problems or opportunities and be ready to capitalize

Investigate: Collaborative decision making, pinpointing the root cause of deviations

Implement: Optimize asset performance, resolve issues faster and with greater accuracy

Evaluate: Measure and express the impact of O&M activities to stakeholders, inform future decisions

At Xempla, we call it the DIIV Framework in short.

Let’s see each of its components in detail to understand how it helps you focus on achieving your cost, efficiency, and sustainability goals while empowering your maintenance teams at planning, decision making, and execution.

Discover

Proactive asset management and maintenance begins with timely discovery of deviations in asset behaviour or opportunities to optimize performance.

Businesses with assets critical to their operations can’t afford to rely on reactive maintenance methods and emergency repairs. Even planned preventive maintenance or scheduled maintenance may not be cost-efficient in the long run and you may lose more than a few productive hours.

When assets are being monitored in real-time, you can keep track of what’s happening. This way, teams are always on alert, and can take the first step to resolving issues before they turn into failures.

How Xempla helps you with discovery:

• Apply workflows from an in-built library of use cases or simply create your own and set them as the basis for receiving alerts.
• Receive alerts when an issue or opportunity is identified. Get clear, actionable insights to mobilize teams.
• Know which issues require attention first and save time by setting which alerts should automatically convert into work orders.

Learn more about Xempla’s discovery capabilities.

Investigate

At this stage, engineers and technicians should be able to exchange observations and feedback to decide the best course of action.

Collaboration inspires confidence in decision making and sets up teams to utilize data, tools and collective expertise much more effeciently. By establishing context and examining data from a variety of vantage points, teams can isolate the root cause of issues to find the most effective ways to solve them.

Investigation of issues as a team helps build shared knowledge which should be readily accessible for troubleshooting future events with more speed and reliability.

How Xempla helps you with investigation:

• Connect with team members to discuss and narrow down possible reasons for the anomaly in asset behaviour
• Pull up asset information with a QR code scan, make it easy for technicians to share observations through text, image and voice chat options.
• Any notes or observations recorded by team members are baked into the algorithm and serve as a means to retain and share your workforce knowledge.

Learn more about how Xempla makes investigation fast and easy.

Implement

Uncertainty or indecision is the greatest hindrance to effective and agile implementation of maintenance activities on the ground.

Since 70% of the O&M workforce currently does not possess the digital and data analytics skills required to make data-driven decisions, the need of the hour is some kind of decision support system to help them execute asset management programs efficiently.

Once teams have the confidence to focus attention where it’s needed most, they need data intelligence and supporting resources to get the job done.

How Xempla helps you with implementation:

• Xempla integrates easily with BMS, CMMS, CAFM & IoT systems to unlock intelligent insights and step-wise recommendations for better execution
• Chatbot OMI provides you with asset performance trends, past records, documentation or any assistance you need, on demand.
• Carry out maintenance, resolve issues quicker and with more reliability in outcomes.

Learn more about how Xempla enables reliable implementation.

Evaluate

Asset performance management strategy is an ever-changing and never-ending process. Assessing impact, what worked and what didn’t, then adjusting your strategy is how you ensure you’re getting closer to your goals.

In traditional methods of evaluation, critical performance indicators and insights get lost in translation and important stakeholders often don’t get the full picture. Transparency in reporting is important for decision makers to gain complete visibility on progress (or lack of it), to understand where more savings or efficiencies can be delivered.

How Xempla helps you with evaluation:

• Measure and compare the impact of programs on cost, productivity, sustainability and more.
• Get an overview of facility metrics and team performance, know what’s contributing to success.
• Generate sharable reports instantly and demonstrate results to all stakeholders transparently.
• Use your performance assessment to inform future decisions, make improvements to your current process.

Learn more about how Xempla makes evaluation simple and transparent.

How O&M teams, facility managers and decision makers benefit from Xempla’s DIIV Framework

The DIIV framework embodies a bottom-up approach to asset operations and maintenance, with your engineers, technicians, and other end users in mind. When the workforce is achieving outcomes as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, facility managers can also breathe a sigh of relief. With easy and transparent reporting, key stakeholders are kept in the loop, while higher level decision makers can focus on business strategy and keeping customers happy.

Helping O&M to make the right decisions at every stage

A predictable and reliable asset performance management strategy requires that O&M teams have the right tools and assistance to make better decisions across the asset lifecycle. Built on the DIIV model, Xempla’s decision support system ensures O&M teams are connected, aligned, and empowered to make better decisions across the asset lifecycle.

Aligning teams with organizational goals

Between the four components of a comprehensive O&M process — discovery, investigation, implementation, and evaluation — there are frictions that can lead to a strategic and operational disconnect. And ultimately foil your attempts at achieving the desired outcomes. In addition to shaping a holistic, standardized process for O&M teams, Xempla reduces that friction and fills in the gaps to prevent this disconnect.

Continuous learning and knowledge retention

Xempla allows you to build a repository of your O&M teams’ knowledge, observations and experience on the job, equipping your organization with all the resources needed to help the workforce sustain a culture of continuous learning and minimize the cost of capacity building.

Moving Forever Forward

More and more FM companies, asset owners and managers are changing their ways to be more flexible and adaptable to the changing times. The ideal solution is to understand the gaps for new developments without fiddling around.

At Xempla, we’re committed to helping you stay forever forward with the power of human-centric innovation and digital transformation. Xempla’s decision support system equips your teams with the right process, tools, and data-driven insights to supercharge your operations and maintenance, helping you deliver outcomes that keep tenants, customers, employees and other stakeholders happy.

Ready to learn more?

Book a meeting with us today or schedule a tour to see what Xempla can do for you.