Blockchain Applications in Facility Management.

The low application of digital transformation projects in our country is due not only to a lack of trust in technology but also to our deficient vision of going beyond daily routine. The analysis and decision to opt for certain technological solutions and digital revolutions in companies must be made by people who have a clear vision and the right decision-making power: from top management to all group resources, there must be inclusion, and the reasons why it is necessary to opt for sometimes revolutionary solutions that could bring enormous benefits must be explained.

According to a survey of some large Italian companies, the main barriers to adoption encountered by those who have not implemented projects are difficulties in identifying benefits, developing skills, and allocating resources.

Not only in the digital transformation field but also in the Blockchain field, the role of top management is essential, which is often the main promoter of experimentation. These must then be developed in the company and implemented together with the individual functional units, with the support of information systems, with an important role for marketing, and a fundamental role for the entire production area.

The top-down approach alone is now considered obsolete and must be replaced by a human-centered and circular approach; we must move towards a company approach of dividing projects among various teams, and each team must have agile and concrete objectives. Each team must have direct contact with the customer to meet their needs and maintain a high level of service quality.

This innovative approach must be supported in every sector by the introduction of new digital tools. In statistical reports that can be read in various publications, the benefits of implementing digital transformation projects are linked to having created a better relationship with partners and suppliers to share necessary and essential information, reduce fraud and data manipulation, and better reconcile data and payments. Greater trust towards partners and suppliers, greater trust from clients, and automation of business processes also emerge.

Data management and its updating are still a critical activity in the management of a single contract, whether public or private: there are still many entities today that do not have structured, ordered, and updated databases with all the data required by the contract signed between the parties.

I would like to remind you that an innovative Facility Manager must know how to manage the following documents:

• Client-side contract
• Supplier-side contract (if the company decides to subcontract all or part of the works to be carried out within the specific Global Service contract)
• Technical tender documentation (intervention reports, maintenance plans, accounting, budget, etc.)
• KPI (Key Performance Indicators) – Expected service levels (S.L.A.) constitute the performance objectives that the contractor agrees to achieve and on which the contractual relationship itself is based; therefore, the KPIs are intended to represent the degree of achievement of the set objectives, and on this basis, a supplier rating will be fed.

But in this scenario just described, how could we reconcile the creation of a link between the world of Blockchain and the world of data management in Facility Management?

First, let’s see what we mean by Facility Management.

It is the discipline capable of managing the essential integrated services for the coordination of spaces and work equipment contained within a building: it integrates principles of administration, real estate management, architecture, and engineering.

Specifically, the Facility Manager is the figure who must have an overall vision in managing one or more buildings and everything it contains and correlates with. They must be a technician, but not only that; they must also possess the right dose of necessary soft skills.

The role of the Facility Manager is to manage the management of a property and its technologies, from building components to facilities, work areas, dining halls, healthcare facilities, parking areas, green areas, human capital, involving all stakeholders. It is a role that, regardless of the size and operational difficulties, must be able to manage any type of building: from condominiums, industrial buildings, resorts, residences, hospitals, and nursing homes; the Facility Manager must coordinate complex tasks and invite all stakeholders.

The Facility Manager must possess the right amount of humility to listen to the team during various meetings, apply their expertise in one of the areas (management, architecture, technology, healthcare, etc.), and have the soft skills to face the necessary resilience. In short, they must have a holistic and systemic view.

We need to consider the presence of a Facility Manager in the management of both public and private assets, especially emphasized by the new evolution of technologies. They must be the one who manages complex activities to control spaces and access: all technologies applied to that contract will produce data that must be processed both locally and in the cloud, in continuous connection with external partners and stakeholders (public administrations, service providers, private customers, etc.). So why not manage the entire cloud part with blockchain technology?

What are the various steps that must be followed for successful real estate management of a Facility Management contract in general?

Let’s see the various points below:

• First, a careful survey and census of the assets to be managed must be carried out.
• Depending on the needs and requests of the client, BIM technology may or may not be used; it must serve as a source of truth for data by building a technically advanced digital framework that can run on blockchain technology.
• Then we enter the operational management phase of the assets, and all information collected in the cloud must be managed and kept up-to-date; not only must they be shared with all parties involved: from suppliers, stakeholders, company employees to customers.
• Each actor must have the possibility of accessing this information in a form of accessibility and transparency to be defined at the beginning of the contract.
• In such a database, there will be all technical, economic, and asset-related information: from individual maintenance plans to monthly maintenance cost reports.
• Certainly, keeping data up-to-date represents the biggest challenge today. Moreover, in Facility Management, it is essential to ensure that all maintenance interventions provided by the contract are carried out; at predefined intervals, it is also advisable that the client performs targeted checks on the service provided.
• By putting all the information regarding the control of approvals, verification decisions, and the management of the entire project on blockchain technology, a combined source of truth covering all aspects of the project and the contract would be created for the first time.
• It is advisable to use an NFC (Near Field Communication) system in addition to using blockchain logic to record data and create a database and subsequent management of the census, providing precise coding for each system, each individual equipment (called an Asset), or homologous equipment aggregate that allows, for management or statistical purposes, to recognize the component (this activity consists of the application and initialization of an NFC tag on each Asset or homologous group of Assets managed).
• All NFCs must contain asset information in alphanumeric format, the correlation of maintenance interventions (work orders) with assets, consistent with the scheduled maintenance plan, and the assignment of codes for evaluating the maintenance status of systems and the relative degree of urgency of corrective interventions (required within the work order).
• the assignment of maintenance status evaluation codes for systems and the corresponding degree of urgency of corrective actions (required within the work order).

Therefore, the singular mastery of Blockchain technology can have significant consequences and provide a tool for creating solutions to the long-standing problem of lack of accountability and fragmentation of information in the public works construction sector and beyond, even in the management of Global Service contracts in both public and private contexts.

As we have emphasized, knowledge of assets and the construction of all those activities for standardization or general upgrading of assets within a maintenance Global Service contract must be public domain; at the end of a contract, the management system must be available to the client, updated and integrated, ready to initiate a new bidding process.

All centralized systems present a high risk of blackout of the entire system; they are widely vulnerable to cyber attacks and often present unsynchronized, outdated, or simply inaccurate data. With Blockchain technology, we can have distributed ledgers that are more difficult to attack because instead of having a single database, there are multiple shared copies of the same database, so a cyber attack should attack all copies simultaneously to be successful.

The real revolution, in fact, is that this Blockchain technology allows an unprecedented level of security, immutability, and traceability, since the content cannot be modified as it is encrypted, stored, and distributed on devices through the network.

Therefore, with a technological platform based on Blockchain logic that can manage the necessary data related to the required maintenance of assets, we can use the following keywords:

• Facility Management
• Global Service
• Single database
• Digital Transformation
• IoT and Machine Learning
• NFC (Near Field Communication)
• Blockchain
• Smart Contract

Using all of them in asset management would achieve significant results in terms of property valuation, cost optimization, and very high personal satisfaction.