The Harvard Business Review recently published an interesting pulse survey on how technology has affected productivity and collaboration in companies. The paper is called “The Connected Workforce”. The study was conducted with 241 respondents consisting of Executives, IT staff, Sales and Business Development personnel at companies employing a minimum of 500 people.
The high-level conclusion of the survey was that 90% of the respondents stated that computing systems and technology has led to productivity improvements in their companies. In addition to this 54% felt that technology has helped them. These results alone conclude that companies need to have a digitalization strategy in place to be competitive in the market. For instance, in facility services the good old “pen and paper” as the operational tool is outdated. That is data which is not real time and easily sharable with stakeholders. That cannot be used for real time decision making enabling better productivity and profitability.
The connected workforce utilizing technology in their companies provides the following identified benefits:
- Improving products and/or services 63%
- Reducing operational costs 63%
- Attracting and keeping clients 35%
- Revenue growth 29%
- Increase in profit margins 24%
These same benefits are often mentioned as results of implementing a work management solution in facility service companies. The results of the survey align the same arguments as facility service companies’ experience when implementing real time work management and planning solutions. Some examples could be shared from Pancomp clients:
- Improving products and/or services: Pancomp enables real time incident/deviation reporting from remote sites. Immediate action follows to correct any deviations. This leads to better service quality and adds trust towards the service provider. This in turn adds to good reputation, which helps to attract new and retain existing clients.
- Reducing operational costs, increasing revenue growth and profit margin: Often planning work gets more effective and reasonable when real time data reports from remote sites are at hand. It helps companies to allocate their staff easier to tasks where they are needed. Also, when effective resource allocation is possible due to real time work management solutions, operational costs are often decreased. This also reflects positively to profits. Especially if we add that the system really enables the possibility to manage additional sales of services with easy to use and real time reporting tool from remote sites that are serviced.
Of course, there are always pro´s and con´s. This blog text reflects on the topics that are often discussed in connection with the experiences from using real time work management and planning software. Some of the things that was highlighted in the survey as obstacles not to reach the above-mentioned results were the following:
- Technology not facilitating collaboration between employees and/or employees and clients.
- Technical issues become obstacles for employees to utilize technology at speed while working.
- Technology makes it in general hard to improve products or services
- Hard to retain existing or attract new clients.
These are all topics that companies within the chosen segment can typically tackle. The usability of technology is the key for success. It must support and add value for the client relationship and internal productivity. Real time reporting helps companies to react fast when deviations occur thus making them a reliable service provider. As stated earlier, this helps to improve the reputation of the service provider and attract new clients and retain the existing ones. Also, nowadays companies within facility services often chooses cloud computing strategies due to the ease of managing the solution.
The study concludes that the companies need to become digital if they have not already embraced the digital world. Digital tools enable companies to drive a connected culture providing many fruitful benefits. This is not only a strategy for big companies, but also smaller companies can become digital by utilizing agile solutions with affordable price. The price can be an issue in the beginning but will surely pay off while implementing digital real time solutions into practice.
Pancomp provides digital tools for transparent service operations. We provide tools for janitorial- and guard services in order to have full transparency in remote service operations. Pancomp Clean is a Janitorial Management Software and Pancomp Secure is a Guard Tour Software. If you want to discuss more about the benefits of the Pancomp solutions and the fit in your operations, do not hesitate to contact Pancomp staff at sales@nullpancomp.com.
