For decades, the Facilities Management industry (and its associated clients) have continued to create and maintain a list of their assets across their portfolios. These asset lists have been the bedrock of contract bidding and benchmarking of costs in the UK’s £120billion industry.
Yet, industry leaders and influencers have also been aware for decades, that their asset lists are far from accurate, and rarely maintained to any meaningful or trust-worthy standard.
So why do we keep doing the same thing and expecting different results?
In their recently published State of FM 2025 Report, SFG20, https://www.sfg20.co.uk/e-guides/state-of-fm-report-2025 only 1 in 10 FM professionals claim to have accurate asset lists, and nearly 40% of respondents confirmed their assets are captured and maintained on spreadsheets.
In today’s world, we must surely focus on solving this multi-decade long challenge and think differently about how we address this monumental inconsistency, especially when so much is riding on it.
After all, with such an inaccurate and inconsistent approach, large portfolios are running blind and susceptible to bad data, rendering poor decisions and unnecessary expense.
Inaccurate asset lists also increase the risk of poor ESG management through life cycle and asset recycling.
At Cloud, we have always taken a materially different approach. We refused to take in any clients asset lists, as we knew they would be inaccurate and inconsistent. Instead, we applied a totally different approach. We built and maintained asset lists through robust and consistent processes evincing far greater management and totally accurate balance sheet reported assets, complete with accurate depreciation methods and capital replacement programmes.
However, it’s now time to take that approach even further. With the explosion of greater technology enablers such as AI and deep learning, we are pivoting even harder.
With our new world-leading technology ‘Mindsett’ (cited by Gartner), we are able to monitor every electrical asset that we care for in terms of its performance, its degradation and can additionally, accurately predict failure long before failure occurs. This approach also enables a science-based approach to capital replacements and recycling.
As a result of deploying Mindsett, we have dispelled the need to create lists of sub-assets, or ‘parent & child’ approaches, removing all the previous complexities, that caused inaccuracies and inconsistencies.
Instead, we respond at the top level only, simplifying the whole approach, and through feedback loops from the frontline, build a new ecosystem of knowledge. This knowledge captures science-based evidence of the root cause of a problem, indicates how to solve the problem, and flags the various failing parts that contributed to the problem.
The knock-on effect is that misdiagnosis is almost completely eradicated, and what we used to refer to as ‘pre-planned maintenance’ is replaced with ‘on-demand maintenance’, reducing both costs and energy consumption and increasing efficiency 100 fold.
This new approach utilising our AI-enabled technology will drive FM as we know it, long into the future.
Find out more via our experience at this year’s Proptech Connect event where we witnessed first-hand how the industry is beginning to pivot its approach.
http://cloudfmgroup-20005040.hs-sites.com/proptech-connect-2025
Cloud are headline sponsors at this year’s PropTech Connect, showcasing the changing global approach to FM and Asset Management – Mindsett and CloudFlex.
Like this? Read more like this:
Mindsett – Be First to the Future – https://www.cloudfmgroup.com/news/an-award-winning-partnership-leading-the-way-in-predictive-maintenance/
CloudFlex – your flexible route to Smart FM – http://cloudfmgroup-20005040.hs-sites.com/cloudflex-0