How do we solve the availability of labour issue in the FM sector?

Probably millions of hours of time is currently going into this question.  In fact, one Operations Director told me recently they had been discussing it with other major FM players as a working group and even considering stopping self-delivery and going to fully sub-contracted.

The reality is, this doesn’t solve the issue.  Sub-contractors will soon be overwhelmed and the problem simply moves from the FM company themselves down to the Tier 1 sub-contractor.  They then can’t complete the jobs, and either they fail on commitments and it gets legal, or they start sub-contracting too.

Costly? Yes.

Messy? Yes.

Does it solve the issue? No.

And all sorts of other solutions have been muted.  Sign-on bonuses and retention bonuses being two major ones being used right now to try to increase the labour pool to fulfil contracts.  Again, this might ease the problem in one provider, but exacerbates the issue in another.  They then fight back with the same tactic and so on…

The reality is this.  There is only two ways to solve the issue:

• Increase the overall labour pool
• Boost engineer productivity

Given that increasing the overall labour pool available to the FM sector is not an overnight exercise, to solve the problem quickly, boosting engineer productivity is key.

You can apply LEAN thinking to materials distribution to the facilities management industry.

LEAN thinking was first begun in 1991 and was applied to manufacturing.   However, it can be applied to just about any process and certainly to mobile engineering.

It’s often remembered by the acronym, TIM WOODS, which names the wastes in any process.  These can be applied to mobile engineers as follows:

T = Transport – Do your engineers travel more than they have to maybe to collect materials?
I = Inventory – Do you waste materials through loss or damage or hold too much van stock?
M = Motion – Do you overuse your vehicles, people or equipment?
W = Waiting – Do your engineers spend time waiting for materials or jobs?
O = Over-processing – Do you do more than necessary to meet contract criteria?
O = Over-production – Do you purchase wrong parts or parts that are unnecessary?
D = Defects – Do engineers visit site without being able to complete the job in hand?
S = Skills – Are engineers with the wrong skill sets being deployed on the wrong jobs?

The reality is that engineer productivity is negatively impacted, and seriously so, by acceptance of the status quo. 

After having applied LEAN thinking to the typical processes that mobile engineers go through each day, it became very clear that there is a huge amount of time wasted on collecting materials, wasted time on site, missing deliveries, carriage charges, lack of communication for suppliers and wrong materials being delivered.

The simplyonsite system was developed to meet those wastes head on.  In fact we eliminate the typical wastes in an engineers day through the way we deliver lighting, electrical and compliance consumables to mobile engineers and boost their productivity by up to 30%.

Whilst RLT Onsite is a distributor of materials to mobile engineers, our staff are essentially productivity consultants, making your team more productive and allowing them to do more in a day, often for less cost!

It’s why so many FM providers now trust us to help them maintain supermarkets, shopping centres, high street stores, public sector organisations, distribution centres and more.

So back to the question.  How do we solve the availability of labour issue in the FM sector?  The answer doesn’t lie in high-tech systems, costly restructuring or bonuses, or even sub-contracting.

It lies in applying a process that has been around for 30 years.

And we’ve already done the deep-dive in how to make it work for the sector.  Our tailored bespoke approach to your specific organisation will provide outstanding results.

Reach out to one of the team today.