Problems commonly faced in facilities management includes a shortage of manpower, low productivity and the lack of consistency and consolidation. Managers find themselves needing to access different platforms in order to check the status of or send out a task or having to manually call or text their workers in order to delegate work, resulting in an inefficient and messy process that makes it difficult to track accountability. Furthermore, auditing may be subjective, and the conditions of facilities may not be true. 

 We recognize the need to shift towards an Integrated Facilities Management system, with the consolidation of data for productivity savings and sets out to solve the problems of labor shortage by improving the productivity of the current workforce and eliminate the messy communication system utilized right now. Moreover, Simpple seeks to bridge the data gap to help managers make the best business decisions. 

 While there are other facilities management systems currently available on the market, they are non-integrative and tend to require the installation of costly infrastructures such as feedback tablets. This results in a system that is limited in its capabilities to solve problems commonly faced by facility owners. In addition, Simpple’s single dashboard display makes it easy to have a quick overview of facility health to help facility owners monitor, analyze and improve site productivity through a singular platform. 

 Through the Simpple Ecosystem, each site is able to deploy and manage all its technologies through a single, unified platform. This allows for facility managers, supervisors and workers to better manage their site through quality audits, workforce management and increase productivity through the implementation of smart toilets and cleaning robotics. Instead of multiple technologies each having its own individual log in and analytics, Simpple Cockpit integrates these technologies into one, having data analytics that cuts across all technologies in order to optimize site management. The unified approach also integrates these technologies at the working level so no tasks are duplicated. Workforce management will be optimized for quality audits and integrated workflow with smart toilets and cleaning robotics. 

Simpple Ecosystem has also received the prestigious Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Innovation Awards 2020 for most innovative technology deployment at a site. This award was won in conjunction with Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital where Simpple Ecosystem was deployed for over a year. The use case example best explains the effectiveness and integration of all technologies in a single site. 

 Reason 1: Easy to Use and Easy to Understand Performance 

Simpple Site Management tool is instinctive, easy to understand and can be used effectively to aid performance monitoring. Once our operations managers are trained in the system, it gives them a bird’s eye view of the various sites and can manage issues, service lapses and identify improvement opportunities easily.  

Through Simpple’s easy to understand cockpit, administrative work is streamlined and helps in consolidating reports and gives managers quick insights to information that matter, so that they can make better decisions. Processes, tasks and problems are all automated so that facilities managers and building owners can ensure compliance and maintain a high clean quality consistently. 

In fact, one of our key clients saw a significant improvement in quality when they saw that re-touchup work had dropped from 288 instances throughout the whole year to only having 1 call in the whole year after Simpple was implemented. This drastic improvement lies in Simpple’s ability to highlight areas of concern for performance tracking and allowing for managers to use this data to further deep dive on the exact issue by predicting trends and deploying a cleaner to site even before the problem arises. 

Reason 2: Effective Human Resource Management 

HR management is key in ensuring that a site is run and maintained well because people are the ones who make sure work gets done. The Simpple Ecosystem treats every worker as a highly valued asset to the site and company and it ensures that this highly valued asset is fully optimized for maximum productivity:  

• Simpple hands out its tasks only to workers who are present on the day. If they did not check-in on the day, their tasks then go to their supervisor who can reassign it. This ensures that tasks will not be left untouched. The attendance feature also helps ensure discipline and performance evaluation. 
• Every time a task is performed, the time and quality of the completion is logged and tracked. In-depth analysis of each worker can be retrieved easily for cleaning companies and facility owners to evaluate a cleaner’s skill set. For example, if a cleaner is consistently lacking in a certain skill, they can send the individual for retraining to improve. Likewise, if a cleaner is consistently faster, more productive and produces better work than their peers, the supervisors can choose to offer rewards to further incentivize such productivity. 
• Through years of operational R&D and testing out various methods of sending out work tasks, IFSC has found most success when task allocation is sent via Whatsapp as workers are comfortable and used to the messaging platform. The html link made it easy for cleaners to track their tasks and update their progress. 

In short, Simpple Ecosystem will help maximize productivity of workers by making sure their time is fully optimized, ensure consistent quality by identifying workers that needs retraining, provide data tracking for reward systems and retention for good workers and keeping track of their P-File so that site managers get a good sense of their ability when they get deployed to another site. 

Through the contactless check-in/out, IFSC’s clients can also ensure that HR administrative work is kept to a minimum, so that their workforce do what they do best. 

Reason 3: Efficient Technology Management 

The key to a successful integrated site lies predominantly in the efficient management of various technologies into a singular platform so that data analysis and performance can be measured as one. Currently, most products adopted by companies do not have open APIs, rendering it difficult to consolidate all the different data within one single platform. There is also limited access to the fully system for command and control which means that any decisions need to still be made by a supervisor manually. Essentially, a human need to be involved in the equation to serve as a bridge between the different products and platforms. 

This had been the perennial issue that IFSC had in its earlier days. To overcome this, IFSC built its own IPs and was able to bring together software, robotics and IoT sensors so that it is able to provide clients with a one-stop solution. With proven track record of integration of all 3 types of technology, IFSC has shown that it has the key to a successful integrated site.