Optima Facility is a Facility Management and Maintenance company with over 2,000 operational centres in Spain and over 6,000 employees. Most clients have technicians working on-site, exclusively dedicated to that maintenance contract, but there is also a mobile unit with 6 technicians to support specialised tasks and provide services to clients who do not have technicians permanently on their premises. Although the business model was well established, they wanted to improve their operations management.
Optima believes that the phrase “we’ve always done it this way” is one of the most dangerous things you can say in business.
Like many companies of the same size, the main challenge Optima faced was centralising information. Without the technology to collect all the data, controlling operations and communicating with the team on site wasn’t very agile. So, Optima’s managers started looking for the best way to manage all their inventory.
At first, they thought the solution would be a new CMMS. The software had to:
- have mobile support and geolocation features;
- centralise information of all assets;
- reduce the amount of paper used by digitising work;
- help develop maintenance plans for each customer;
- collect more data on operations to cross-reference with maintenance plans, work orders, and costs for each contract.
The solution they found was not a CMMS, but Infraspeak’s Intelligent Maintenance Management Platform (IMMP). Apart from the technical requirements and the flexibility that the platform offered them, there was something else that united us. One of Optima Facility’s core values has always been innovation. The company sets out to create harmony between technology, people, and processes. And that is a philosophy we share.
They joined the intelligent maintenance revolution in 2020. Despite the pandemic delaying the whole process, they implemented Infraspeak in just 4 months. The onboarding happened over 5 remote meetings and a 1-day face-to-face course in Barcelona with different sessions for managers and technicians.
Unsurprisingly, they started with the mobile unit. Now, not only can they communicate better through the Infraspeak app, but they can also assign tasks to technicians according to their location, for example. In repairs, where each minute counts, they react much faster.
This unit already has 76 clients, 94 buildings, and 1000 assets registered on the platform, 92.9% of which are identified with an NFC tag. Technicians can access all the information about each piece of equipment on the mobile app straight away, including user manuals and previous maintenance records.
The increased responsiveness and ease with which they access all this data is reflected in the average repair time. The mobile unit has become more efficient, closes work orders faster, and has optimised its resources. But they hope to improve further in the future, with the adoption of Infraspeak Direct for breakdown reporting at certain clients.
An added advantage of NFC tags is ensuring technicians are present on site. This feature brings more transparency to Optima’s operations, as clients can check when, and for how long, each maintenance task was performed. On the other hand, Optima is able to adjust each maintenance contract exactly to the number of assets covered and the work required.
By having all inventory recorded and digitised in Infraspeak, Optima’s managers can monitor all buildings, maintenance history, and compliance with maintenance plans. They then also integrate this information with each customer’s costs, sales, and reporting.
It is still too early to talk about numbers, but Antonio Sánchez Ródenes, technical services manager, guarantees:
“Compared to the previous software, with Infraspeak we lose much less information. In addition, the platform allows us to review each job with ease and adjust plans and resources in the best way.”
The challenge now is to expand Infraspeak from the mobile unit to Optima’s thousands of operating centres across Spain. However, they already introduce the platform to all clients who don’t already have a CMMS or other maintenance management software.
And what’s next? In addition to preventive maintenance plans, Antonio Sánchez reveals that he intends to manage all reactive maintenance processes through Infraspeak.
The next step, however, is to integrate Infraspeak with Business Intelligence software and other management tools to analyse operations, manage purchases, and organise all information about equipment without having to use paper. For a company whose priority is harmony, “integration” is the keyword for the future.
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