Middle East Construction & Real Estate Podcast

Exploring Facilities Management in the UAE with Stuart Harrison, CEO of Emrill

• Jonathan Eveleigh

Share episode

Unlock the secrets of modern Facilities Management with Stuart Harrison, the CEO of Emrill, in our latest episode! 
Stuart shares his remarkable journey and provides invaluable insights into the evolution of the FM industry, from traditional maintenance tasks to the adoption of cutting-edge technologies like AI and computer-aided systems. Discover the distinct characteristics of the UAE's FM market, shaped by its personal, family-oriented business culture and a heightened focus on efficient building management in a post-COVID world.

We also discuss the emerging trends that are redefining facilities management. Learn the difference between soft and hard FM services and get a clear understanding of Total Facilities Management (TFM) and Integrated Facilities Management (IFM). Stuart offers a balanced view on whether to outsource FM services or keep them in-house, highlighting how outsourcing can free up businesses to focus on their core competencies while ensuring their facilities are expertly maintained. If you've ever been puzzled by the intricacies of FM services, this episode is your guide.

Finally, we dig into the practical side of maintaining critical assets, touching on preventive, reactive, and condition-based strategies to optimize resource use and minimize disruptions. From energy-efficient innovations like variable speed chillers to the role of technology platforms such as TechSphere, discover how the latest advancements are transforming facilities management. Stuart's expertise offers a comprehensive look at how these strategies contribute not only to operational efficiency but also to sustainability goals. Don't miss this enlightening episode packed with actionable insights and forward-thinking strategies in the world of Facilities Management.

https://mecrepodcast.buzzsprout.com/

Speaker 1:

Welcome everyone to this latest episode of the Middle East Construction and Real Estate podcast. Thank you for joining us. We've got another great show for you today. With another in our list of top quality guests. I'm delighted to be joined by Stuart Harrison, chief Executive Officer of Emril, one of the UAE's leading facilities management service providers. Stuart is a highly experienced FM professional with over 30 years of experience, and he joins us today to share his FM industry insights, knowledge and some key pieces of advice. So it's time to get started and hear from Stuart. Stuart, a very warm welcome and many, many thanks for joining me. I know we've been trying to get this done for a while now and, for various reasons, it's not been possible, so I'm very grateful to you for sparing the time to do this.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thanks on the. On the contrary, I'm delighted and, as I say, apologies for not getting together sooner, but it should be interesting.

Speaker 1:

Good, no, well, you're very welcome. No problem at all and, as I say, thanks for sparing the time. Look, maybe we can kick things off by getting you to give our listeners an introduction to both you individually and an overview of the Emerald business, if that's okay, yeah sure.

Speaker 2:

So obviously, stuart Harrison, I won't give you a full life story, but I started my working life as an apprentice electrician, much to my dad's disappointment, because he wanted me to be a lawyer. But I wanted to get a job and buy a motorcycle, which is what I did. And then I did actually go and do a law degree but came back to engineering in my early 20s and that's where I've been ever since. So I worked in construction initially and then manufacturing, and then I kind of accidentally ended up in facilities management, because it wasn't called facilities management back then, it was called maintenance, um, and I kind of accidentally fell into that um, you know, nearly 20 years ago now, looking after an airport.

Speaker 2:

And I found it really interesting because in in construction you generally build something and disappear, but in in FM you can potentially spend a lifetime looking after a cluster or you know a set of buildings or even one very interesting building. So you know, I found that it was interesting, I liked it and you know, if you like something you tend to do well at it. And here I am now as the CEO of Emeril. Emeril is a joint venture currently owned by EMAR and Alpha Team. So EMAR, obviously a large property developer and Alpha Team. Well, also a property developer, but also into electronics, car sales and you know huge UAE family that's great.

Speaker 1:

And so, with that background that you've just described, and obviously such extensive experience built up over those 20 odd years, I guess you must have seen some fairly significant changes in the facilities management industry and the market in the UAE over the past decade or so.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I guess it's perspective. So I prefer it's a bit of a mouthful, but I prefer punctuated equilibrium. So what tends to happen is you tend to get called maintenance, and then I think it was really tied into education. So as soon as universities started to do courses in maintenance, it kind of became known as facilities management and that helped with awareness. But then also, as technology adapted, we were able to hold much more information and do a lot more analytical stuff with that information, and so again that that grew. So you kind of get these step changes.

Speaker 2:

Um, where you know, I remember back in the old days we used to be a paper-based system. So if we were looking after, for example, a hospital, the air conditioning system within the hospital would have an old lever arch file with a whole load of paperwork in there. And then a computer program came along called the CAFM system, which is a computer-aided facilities management system which is basically nothing more than a huge database and you can input information. But what that enabled you to do was then start to measure systems against other systems so you would learn whether one system was more efficient than another. And of of course, now we've seen the emergence of things like AI when it now it does it for you.

Speaker 2:

So you know it's very sophisticated now. So the system will tell us when it sees an anomaly or it sees a trend or a pattern, which is obviously very helpful for us because it saves us time and we can go on and address address the issue. So I'm not sure like I've seen a mass. You know, even the industrial revolution didn't happen overnight, it was over a period of years and that's kind of what I've seen is like I said when I did my master's in management that's where I got that phrase from that punctuated equilibrium, and I've always found that that sums things up very well. So it's kind of organic growth, with the odd step change thrown in.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, interesting. I mean, that's a nice way of putting it. Actually, I want to just unpack that a little bit more, if I can, given what you've said. I guess some of what you've said is around the FM industry globally. What I want to do is just unpack a little bit about whether you think that the UAE FM industry differs, particularly from other countries where, let's say, fm may be more established, and if it does differ, in what ways.

Speaker 2:

Well, my view of it is it's more personal in the UAE for a number of factors. Now, I find that the UAE is very family orientated. They like to do business with people rather than with companies. What I find is that over here, people now certainly since COVID as well are much more interested in what's going on in their building, in what's going on in their building. Now, my experience because I left the UK over a decade ago now and it was quite impersonal so you would be looking after buildings but people weren't terribly interested as long as it was hot enough or cold enough, as long as the lights were on when they needed to be on that kind of thing. Nobody was really terribly interested in facilities management. They just got on with their core activities. Whereas even if you're looking after a bank over here, they're still quite interested in what's going on in their building.

Speaker 2:

Um, you know, is the air clean? What kind of purification methods are you using? Which? Which standards are you adhering to? Is it ash ray? Is it? You know, is it british standard? Seven, six, seven, one, what you know what? What are you using? And I found that particularly since COVID, but in all the time that I've been in the UAE. I've found it much more personality driven. So people, like I said, people buy people. They don't buy necessarily companies and at Emerald we run the business like a family business and I found that that's worked very well for us. So when kind of you know, I don't know something happens on site, what you tend to get is kind of all the top people from emerald descent and turn up and we take it very personally and I found that that's been kind of a usp for us is that you know, we, we, um, we connect with the people rather than the building, if that makes sense?

Speaker 1:

yeah, no, it does, it does absolutely. And again, I like your, I like your, uh, your, your sort of um summary being, you know, the UAE being a bit more relationship-based, shall I say, rather than transactional, which may be in other parts of the world. Just sticking with that, then, for a minute. Do you think, then, that brings any particular challenges to FM companies operating in the UAE, given that it is perhaps more relationship-based than just purely commercially transactional? Does that bring more challenges, do you think, than in other countries?

Speaker 2:

Well, it can do, and it reminds me of a funny story. So one of the best engineers I've ever met and ever worked with had very bad people skills. So if there was a problem he would. You know, like I said, he was the best engineer I've ever worked with, but he wasn't very good at talking to people and so as a consequence of that, he really struggled to get get along, whereas in the UK it didn't matter so much, whereas I found that here, you know, if, if there's, if there's a particular issue in a very prestigious building, all the top people want to see who you are, and it's that kind of assurance thing. So before you've even started to tackle the problem as long as it's not, of course, something that needs an emergency they want to talk to you and find out who you are and what you're about and what your attitude to work is. And you know particularly you know I'm a big family man, so I often talk about my family and then, once they've got that assurance that you're the kind of guy that fits with their you know the way that they like to do things then you get on and tackle the engineering problem. So it does present issues, but it also has huge advantages as well. So I wrote a paper a few years ago and I taught I use the example of you know, let's say you've got a plumbing issue and you know the plumber turns up and he does a technically perfect job, but you know, he pulls up and he drives over your flower bed, he kicks the dog on the way in and he's dressed scruffily and he's rude to your wife. Now you're never going to re-employ that company, even though he did a technically brilliant job, and the converse of that is you can. Now I wouldn't, of course, advocate doing a bad job, but you can almost do a bad job if you're very personable and if you're very likeable. And I've found that that's the kind, the dichotomy, if you like, of certain places, not just the UAE, there's a lot of places that are very personality driven. But yeah, so it potentially creates problems, like I said, if you've got.

Speaker 2:

Engineers tend to be peculiar people sometimes. You know they're often kind of mathematical geniuses or engineering geniuses, without perhaps the people skills that I don't know perhaps a salesman has, and they just like to get on in a back room. You know you're unlikely to find me in a suit a lot of the time and people joke about me being scruffy, but I always joke with my boss that I don't. I never know when I'm going to have to go and fix something. So you know, know and and so, yeah, I guess it's a little bit give and take. You know it can present challenges, but also it gives you the opportunity to get to understand people. So a contract says one thing, but what it says in the contract might be quite different to what an individual wants in in his particular part of the building and how and how he wants it dealt with yeah I think you're absolutely right.

Speaker 1:

Getting that balance, getting that balance right between technical competency and, as you say, people skills is is a challenge in itself. It is, and, and you know, the good engineers, as you say, don't always have those appropriate personal skills. Um, look, I want to be. I want to be a little bit, I guess, provocative now, if I can. Fm for many years has had a reputation of being a bit of a grass-cutting window-cleaning type service. Can you give us a better impression of what FM actually is, what it encompasses, the benefits it brings to the building itself and the owners, the funders, occupiers, etc yeah.

Speaker 2:

So I think, to sum it up in a very quickly is it used to be that if something breaks, the fm guys or the maintenance guys turn up and fix it, whereas now it's much more proactive? So when we take over a building, whether it's new or whether it's a, you know, a 50 year old building, we we look at the whole building and we start to think about its life cycle and, as I said, capturing that data is very important. So when I talked about that CAFM system, so you might have 100,000 assets and we might categorize that as a parent-child. So a parent system might be the lighting system, and within the lighting system you've got various rooms all the way down to each individual lamp or light bulb or whatever you want to call it, and all that stuff needs to be inputted into the system. And then what we can do is we can look at the lifecycle. So what we can say is, for example, in a mall you might have a let's, let's.

Speaker 2:

Use as an example the cafeteria area or the food court of a mall, and it's very challenging an example the cafeteria area or the food court of a mall, and it's very challenging to change the light. So if you wait until a light bulb blows over that area. You've got to set a scaffold up, you've got to disrupt the area. So what you might choose to do is consider the life cycle of an average lamp and then you might say, right, we'll bulk fit them. So we'll close that food court down on one particular day, or during the night, we'll set our systems up and then we'll change them all, even though they're still working, because we know that within the next, I don't know, say six months, a certain percentage of these lights are going to fail.

Speaker 2:

So I guess I'm using that as an example to talk about the way that we now proactively manage systems rather than just wait until they break.

Speaker 2:

So I think that's that's it. You know, we haven't got a lot of time and obviously we could talk about this for, for you know, all day. But if I was going to sum it up in the difference between what used to be maintenance and what is now facilities management, it's about the level of intelligence that you put into the job and and how you view. So you know, again, a good example was I used to look after a group of hospitals in the UK and it was a 36-year contract and I got that job just before I was 40 years old, and I remember saying to my wife I'll probably retire whilst working on these buildings because it was a 36-year project. So when I was making my plans, I was thinking about what's going to happen in 10 years or 15 years, or even 20 years and and rather than you know, waiting for something to break and then just go and fix it, it's interesting.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I want, I want a bit later I want to come back to that reactive, proactive, um uh, scenario, but for now that's great. I just also want to, just therefore, ongoing from that same question, just ask you if you think. Therefore I think it was said there is, but let me ask you do you think there's a greater understanding and appreciation, therefore, of what FM is and does across the UAE and the value and the benefits of adopting a full FM service to those property stakeholders?

Speaker 2:

Yes, there is, and I'm glad you added in the UAE, because I talked to my friends in the UK and they say, whilst the technology's moved on and all the things that I've just talked about, people are still for want of a better word quite ignorant about what FM is. So when I go back home and people ask me sometimes what I do, it's a bit of a joke because I just serve an electrician and my wife says why do you say that? And I'm like well, I don't want to explain what facilities management is, because it's not terribly interesting if you're not into that kind of stuff and it takes a long time. But in the UAE people are now quite interested and I don't know, maybe it's a younger kind of demographic, if you like in terms of buildings, because there's, you know, in the UAE we're not talking about 400 year old hospitals, we generally talking about buildings that are only a few decades old at the most, and so people are much more interested in what's going on in their building. And it wasn't terribly hard to educate people.

Speaker 2:

You know, when I go now to try and win contracts, one of the selling points that I talk about is I'm not just talking about today or tomorrow I'm talking about in five years time or 10 years time, and I've been at Emerald now for 10 years and I used to be, I used to run the bid team, so and I'm one of the youngest people or people that have been here the least, I mean, our COO has been here 22 years.

Speaker 2:

So if you do a, you know, if you take a contract with Emeril, it's very likely that you're going to be talking to the same people in five or 10 years. So of course, we take a long term view of things and I've found that that's particularly in the UAE. So you know, I'm sure there are other countries around the world as well, but the UAE, I find, is always pushing at the forefront of technology. They like to, you know, they're early adopters. Like I said, whether it's a young demographic or whatever it is, whatever's driving that, I'm not quite sure, but there's certainly more interest in facilities management than there used to be or, like I've said, perhaps is in other countries.

Speaker 1:

Just explain for us what are the, I guess, the core services typically offered by a tier one FM company like Emeril and, at the same time, can you explain what are the differences between TFM Total Facilities Management and IFM Integrated Facilities Management, if indeed there is any difference between?

Speaker 2:

them. I don't think there's much of a difference between the phrase TFM and IFM. I think there's gray areas and it tends to vary. So total FM usually means all of the engineering and soft services. I'll talk about that in a minute. But what it's sometimes coming to include is also maybe even rent collection services. It is also maybe even rent collection services, things that property management would traditionally do, that the engineering services in a facilities management company might not do.

Speaker 2:

So to break down kind of what we offer as a tier one company, we usually try and break it up into two categories, so the soft fm and hard fm. And in soft fm you typically find things like cleaning, concierge, security, um, lifeguards, um, those kind of non-technical if you like. Now they probably get quite upset at me because cleaning um, I attended the um, you know the cleaning awards um, and they are very technical now the type of chemicals they use, and so I really don't mean to offend anybody, but I mean traditionally, you know, there was a kind of seen as a separation between the engineering technical roles and some of the soft services roles. In this hard services again, we're traditionally talking about lighting systems, power distribution, power generation, all the kind of usual technical services that you might expect, that is, you know, mechanical and electrical.

Speaker 1:

Got it Okay. That's a great explanation, and I wasn't sure about the TFMI. They're just expressions that I've heard a few times. I wasn't sure whether they were more or less the same thing, but it sounds like they are One other thing. Just on the same sort of subject, if I can ask you what's your view, I guess, about companies that may choose to outsource FM services versus having them in-house? How does that work?

Speaker 2:

I always find this a challenging question to answer. Answer because, as an engineer, I would prefer to have control over it. So if I owned a building or a company, I would probably want to do it in-house. But that's because I'm an engineer. If I was a lawyer which is, as I said, I did a law degree many years ago I probably wouldn't want to, because I'd want to concentrate on my core activities. So if I was running a very large, you know business let's imagine I'm a lawyer and I've got a G plus 100, you know, a Burj Khalifa or something like that I'd prefer to concentrate on my actual core activities of legal services and I would employ somebody to come in and look after the building.

Speaker 2:

And I always think FM is a it's not a glamorous role because you're always, hopefully, in the back of house. So what you really want is that they don't even notice that you're there. So the building is the right temperature, the lighting is just perfect, the concierge smiles and greets you as you walk in. It's clean, it's secure, the security guards are looking after the building, the lifeguard is doing his job properly. You don't really notice those people. You know so much and and that's when I think you get it. You get it perfect. Um, and I, like I said, I I would um honestly propose to somebody who's an expert in business or some business that isn't building, maintenance or engineering or whatever, to outsource it, because it means that you don't have to worry about your building. You've got experts like us that do this for you know, professionally, as a living, and we'll make sure that your environment is safe, clean, nice to work in and you can concentrate on on other things.

Speaker 2:

In terms of cost, I don't think it actually makes a lot of difference whether you're employing people in-house or whether you're outsourcing. And then you've got all the kind of practicalities like offsetting risk and things. So we often have KPIs, you know, key performance indicators, service level agreements, even penalties. So you know, when I used to look after a PFI hospital in the UK, if a theatre was out of action for a day, the penalty for that was £80,000, and so the NHS was was pretty. You know sure that we we would not have a theatre out of use because of those penalties in place. So it meant that you know, for example, the clinical staff could get on with treating people and we would look after the building in the background. So, like I said, it's a little bit of a kind of a double-edged sword for me to answer, because as an engineer, I would always want to maintain control over my own building, but if I was a lawyer then I would outsource it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. If it's not your core business, then why pretend to try and do it? I just want you to keep your owner's hat on. You almost put yourself in the position of being an owner there when you're talking about, you know whether you're a lawyer or an actually actually a, you know, building maintenance type company. Just keep that owner's hat on for a minute. What? As an owner, what would be some of the um more common let's call them pain points or frustrations that you would face as an owner where the FM service being provided, let's say, could be improved somewhat?

Speaker 2:

Well, it's usually what catches your eye. So, in my experience over you know, I don't know the best part of 30 years really a bit involved in one way or another, if you walk into a mall, you notice how clean it is. You know, walk into a room, you notice dirty marks on the wall. Now, as long as it's not too hot or too cold with um so, but usually, um, like I said, it's, it's uh, the soft services, um, you know, we used to look after a large mall and I remember getting a phone call one morning because the tv you know the large tv advertisements had gone off. Yeah, no, everything else in the mall was absolutely perfect, but that's the first thing that the mall manager had noticed. And so I think pain points usually are what people you know for first, first perceptions.

Speaker 2:

If you're looking after a hotel or if you own a hotel, you want people to walk through the door and that customer experience to be absolutely perfect from the minute they step out of the vehicle. You don't want any litter on the floor. You want the, the decor to be nice, you want the floor to be clean, you want the concierge to be well dressed. You know, you want that assurance that you're in a real tier one environment. You know, an office building should be the same.

Speaker 2:

It should be a nice place to work and and I find that those first perceptions are are the bits that really trip you up. It's the things that you might not think are important, like the dirty mark on the wall or the piece of chewing gum on the floor. It's the attention to detail that makes I'm not going to give you a sales pitch for Emerald, but I think that's what differentiates us. So we're a bit like the special forces of FM, so the British Army do a certain role, and then you've got special forces that do exactly the same thing, but they just do it to a higher standard, um, and, and that's the difference. So we just do what everybody else does, but we just think we do it a little bit better.

Speaker 1:

And it's because of that attention to detail I want to unpack something stewart that you you touched on earlier.

Speaker 2:

Um, that I think is quite important and that, and that's that subject of preventative versus reactive maintenance, and I guess how important you think it is for owners to choose and use the appropriate one, and what the effects or risks might be of not doing so yeah, that's a great question and that does give me a chance to sell tier one fm services not necessarily emerald, but tier one services because there's there's a whole bunch of ways that you can manage your assets and that's everything from run to failure, which means that it let's. Let's imagine you've got a pump and it runs, for example, a fountain, um, and it fails, and you've got one in the stores and within 20 minutes a guy can grab that pump and run down and put the fountain back in into service and it's, it's not, it's, you know, it's not going to ruin anybody's day. Now, if you contrast that with the exact same pump that might be in use in, say, a hospital operating theater, it's an anesthetic gas scavenging pump and and that needs to remove the gases that are being used during anaesthesia and that those things can be incredibly toxic and it needs to be. You know they need to be removed from the environment quickly and efficiently and there's always two of those and you would definitely not run those to failure, because you cannot afford during an operation, for those to fail, because that means you might have to stop anaesthetizing somebody who's halfway through an operation. So, as I said, there's always two, so you've got redundancy, but what you would do then is there's a couple of other choices that you've got.

Speaker 2:

You could either do condition based maintenance, which means that at a set time period it might be weekly, daily, monthly you would go up and check things like vibration on the drive end and non-drive end bearings. You would check whether it's using too much current or too much energy, which would be a sign that something might fail soon, and then you would replace it very quickly. Or you could you know you could do just a very you might say, for example, have information from the manufacturer to say that the average mean time to failure for this type of pump is, let's say, 14 months. Well, you might then make a decision to just change it after 12 months, regardless of what's happening, and that means that you don't necessarily have to do so much daily or weekly activity around it or weekly activity around it. You just know that you've got a redundant pump and also you're going to change them both at 12 months or 12 months of use, or so many hours or whatever it is.

Speaker 2:

So what that means is another one was you know I talked about the food court area, you know whether it's bulk change in light bulbs because you've got to set up a scaffold to get to them and you don't want to be setting it up every other day to get you know to be able to work at height, or whether it's in a clinical setting or a very critical setting, that again you don't need any disruption. So you've got a bunch of things that you can do every everything from run to failure to predictive maintenance, condition based maintenance or just changing something based on historical meantime to failure.

Speaker 1:

Okay, interesting. So are you therefore saying that it doesn't have to be all or nothing, it doesn't have to be all preventative, and obviously you don't want it to be all reactive, but you can, to some extent, mix and match, is that?

Speaker 2:

what you're saying. Yeah, exactly, and that's the difference between tier one services. So when we come in, what we would do is we would do a condition report. Well, first of all we do a verification to prove that the asset is actually there, and then you do a condition report, and then we might go back to the customer and say, look, you've got 100,000 assets and we think that a third of them are very critical.

Speaker 2:

So you need to either do you know, very sort of attention to detail, preventative type activities like measuring the current that something's using, or vibration or something like that. But you've also got, I don't know, say one third of things that actually are not terribly important, like, let's say, you know a light in a store cupboard which, if it fails, it's not a huge deal. It just means it takes five minutes for somebody to change the lamp. Or you know the light in a store cupboard which, if it fails, it's not a huge deal. It just means it takes five minutes for somebody to change the lamp, or you know, or the fluorescent tube or something, and you might decide to run that to failure. So that's where the benefit of tier one services come in, because it means you probably don't need as many people. You certainly don't need as many resources. There's much more intelligence around it and it means that you're actually tackling the building with a genuine intelligence, rather than just changing things so to say, go away or wait until something breaks.

Speaker 2:

So that's that's where it comes in now, over a period of time, that really starts to pay dividends, because you know whether it's in a hospital and it means that you experience zero negative effects on patients, which is a huge problem in in clinical environments. You know whether it's a data center, where you know, for a bank where you know, or an airport where you know. I think I worked out one day that if, if the air conditioning failed in a terminal at an airport and they had to close it down, it was, it was seven, it was many millions of pounds per day anyway that it would cost. So, again, you know. That's where those tier one services really do pay dividends. Yeah, interesting.

Speaker 1:

Okay, now I want to move on to what I guess is probably the hottest topic around at the moment, and that's sustainability. Obviously, with COP28 being held recently in Dubai, how can FM contribute, or does FM contribute, to enhancing energy efficiency and improving sustainability in buildings? And again, how can FM, or is FM already helping achieve environmental targets being set by the authorities and building owners?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and there's a multitude of ways. I did a lecture at a university a few years ago and things have even moved on from then. But I mean, for example, so you can have variable speed chillers. Now, what used to happen was nobody was terribly energy conscious and energy was cheap, or at least relatively cheap anyway. So, um, most buildings were over designed because nobody wanted to experience failure. So you might have had a building where five huge chillers were installed and it only really needed two, and they're also fixed speed chillers where now the technology exists so that you can vary the speed.

Speaker 2:

So what we can do now is we can use I guess, for want of a better expression just enough energy rather than too much energy. And then what we can do is we can monitor emerging technology. So technology is moving so, so quickly at the moment that you know it's almost like the days of buying a laptop in, you know, 1984. As soon as you bought the thing, it was obsolete by the time you got out of the store. And things are moving on so quickly that you really have to have your finger on the pulse. So again, every, almost every day, new emerging technology is coming out that enables us to.

Speaker 2:

You know, use less energy or or the conservation of energy and that kind of thing. And then you've also got the the human elements as well. So you know, I always say that I believe that I can save 10 energy without anything other than just educating people to turn the ac off when they leave a room, turn the lights off um, you know various things like that. You know I know it sounds small, but don't fill the kettle when you only want one cup. And you know those those little things again, that just if you've got a thousand people in a building and they're all doing that, then it really starts to add up quickly we've all, we've all seen it, haven't we?

Speaker 1:

the air, the air con blasting away, and on the door, you know, from inside to outside, is left open with a, with a security guard stood by the side of it. You could quite easily pull it shut, or or any any of the building occupants for that matter, could just pull it shut. Yeah, you're right, it does all make a difference. Just sticking with technology, then, and aside from or as well as the sustainability aspect, are there any specific technology initiatives that FM companies are using to improve the general sort of level of service that they deliver, are using to improve the general sort of level of service that they deliver? Are there any innovative approaches, aside from just technology, any other innovative approaches being used to help things like cost efficiency of FM, without compromising on quality? You mentioned KaFM systems earlier. We know that KaFM has been in existence for I don't know, probably nearly 20 years, I guess is it, but there must be some other technologies that are being introduced. You know, since then, I guess.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there is and this is where I'm kind of being careful not to do a sales pitch but we have a platform called TechSphere and we did an interview that you can find online about that me and our head of IT and the reason that came about was we were finding apps that were very, very good and nowadays I'm 51, so I feel like an old man but you get these kids in university in their bedrooms in I don't know, maybe in Mumbai or something, and that's exactly what happened was some guy over in India created an app that we just thought was amazing and it was an efficiency based app, but we struggled to integrate that with our system. So I went to the head of IT and said, look, how can I capture these amazing things that are coming out and integrate them all into one system? I want an aggregator, you know. I mean, I don't have 10 phones or 100 phones. I have one phone with 100 apps on it, and that's what I wanted. So we created TechSphere and it took us two years. And we know we were at the forefront of technology because initially we couldn't really find anybody that could do it for us and we ended up finding a company in America that was designing stuff for the military, and they were one of the only people that could put it together. And now I've got a system where I can capture anything on the planet, whether it's, uh, you know, whether it's something that, uh, you know, apple or Microsoft or somebody like that bring out, or whether it's literally an app that a kid's designed that his bedroom, you know, on the other side of the world, that I can capture that and integrate it seamlessly in our systems and just use it.

Speaker 2:

Um, and it. It sounds. It sounds like something that should be very easy, but it was actually terribly complicated to do and that's paid us huge dividends. So we've got I mean, just a very, very simple one is an app that our cleaners use that shows where they've been, and what we're able to do is when people phone up, and they might phone up and see there's a mark on the wall or there's, you know, I don't know, some litter's been dropped or something that feeds into this app, so the cleaner might have just been there 10 minutes ago.

Speaker 2:

Let's say it's on a multi-story car park or an underground car park, but somebody, you know, unfortunately people do these things they empty their ashtray on the floor, or they throw some litter and somebody might report that, or it gets seen by the cameras and the AI system and it feeds into the app that then tells the cleaner that, hey, you need to backtrack and go and clean this area and, as I said, it also tells the other cleaners where their colleagues have been. And again, it sounds like something so simple, but we're able to geofence areas and our cleaners. Now then you know they're not just people who walk around with a broom. These are intelligent people that use technology to make sure that the areas are always clean and they've always covered all the bases or, you know, been to places where they need to more frequently than other places, you know, especially since COVID and the prevention of infection and things like that. Yeah, that sounds really impressive.

Speaker 1:

And you're right. Covid and the prevention of infection and things like that yeah, that sounds really impressive. And you're right, often these solutions are quite simple. Getting the technology or the tech guys, I suppose, to incorporate them into the way you operate is somewhat more difficult and challenging, but the solution is often quite simple. But that's very impressive. I guess. Also, if you then take what you've just said about the way you use technology and applications or whatever else it may be, can you just explain how you make sure as a business that you have, as much as possible, a seamless experience between actual construction of a building through to the occupation and then the ongoing maintenance while you're delivering those FM services within that live occupied building or premises?

Speaker 2:

So other places might have a BIM tool where there's a virtual building in a system, and one of one of the things that I think the UK does well, um, is that the FM guys are involved from the very beginning, from the plants. So you know if, if a building was was being planned before construction, they would involve me and I would go and look and say, well, you can't put that there right. I mean, I wasn't very I won't say where, but there was an oxygen manifold room next to a kitchen and oxygen is. You know, oxygen enriched environments tend to tend to explode. So I was very quickly able to say no, no, you can't do that, that needs to be moved. That's not as mature here yet as as perhaps it could be.

Speaker 2:

So we do occasionally get it. We do sometimes, or more frequently now, get asked to be involved at the design stage, um, but it's not frequent. Sometimes we get involved at the construction stage. It's particularly if a building takes, say, two years to construct, because you know you might install I don't know an air conditioning unit in in the first year, but the building isn't actually complete until the second year, so it still needs maintaining in that year and again, that's becoming more normal, but it could be better.

Speaker 2:

So we're always advocating involve us at the design stage or, at the very least, please involve us at the construction. So it's important to get AFM involved at the design stage or, like I said, the construction phase, so we can actually say hang on a minute, that's going to be impossible to maintain. You know it's it might look brilliant on an architect's drawing but actually practically for the next 50 years that that ball or 100 years that that building is standing, it's going to be either impossible or very, very difficult and very time-consuming and costly to maintain it because it's, you know, the design isn't maintenance friendly if, or fm friendly, if you like.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, yeah no, exactly, I mean that early involvement, as you say, is critical, isn't it? And hopefully, hopefully, people do start um, doing that a little bit more. Then it will avoid some of that, as you call it, value engineering or or changes that become inevitable. You know, further, further through the construction phase, when people do start realizing that it just doesn't work from an FM point of view. Okay, look, I'm conscious.

Speaker 1:

Obviously, fm is a huge topic, stuart, and we knew we weren't going to get through a lot of what it is that we wanted to talk about. Maybe what we can do is get you back on for a future episode and cover some other issues, but unfortunately time has beaten us. We do try and limit these podcasts to around 45 minutes if we can, and sadly that means our time is up for this one. It's been great speaking with you, stuart, it really has. It's been fascinating some of the things that you've talked about and hopefully the listeners will have been informed about as well and found it interesting. So thank you very much Before I do let you go, one thing we like to do in this podcast is to just leave the listeners with some sort of key message or takeaway or nugget of information message or takeaway or nugget of information.

Speaker 1:

Um, if you were to offer one piece of advice to the listeners, um, whether they be service providers themselves, I suppose, or owners or occupiers, what, what would that be? What piece of advice would you want to leave with everybody?

Speaker 2:

well for sure, don't, don't, don't, cheap out on your maintenance. It's, you know, it's like your car if you don't look after your car, it's going to break down. And if you, if you, you know, people spend billions of dirhams on on buildings you know, iconic buildings, um, and then they try and get cheap maintenance, um, you know. So the the, I think it's around about, I think the life cycle of a building, in terms of cost, is around about 10 on construction and then 90 over the life cycle of a building in terms of cost is around about 10% on construction and then 90% over the life cycle of the building. So, if you think about that, you really want to pay a lot of attention to that 90%. And all too often people spend a huge amount of money on construction and then they try and do the maintenance as cheap as possible and it just means that you're going to get bitten in 10 or 15 or 20 years time when, when items in the building or or even the building envelope itself starts to fail, and that's when it really hurts you.

Speaker 2:

And that's all about. You know, people say intelligence is the ability to look into the future, and that's where I find that you know a lot of people kind of don't, don't take a long term view, and you know I, I own, own my own house and I always take. You know, if I'm having a roof I don't want it to last five years, I want it to last 30 years, you know. So I always don't mind spending money on maintenance. So when, when I get a new boiler fitted or you know I get a roof done or something, I never haggle with the price as, like you know, as long as it's it's realistic and I always I and I always pay because I recognize the value of good facilities management.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's great advice. Focus on the 90%, not just 10%. Yeah, I like that. That's great advice. Stuart, thank you again for joining us. It's been fascinating. I've really enjoyed it and I'm sure the listeners will do as well. Thank you for joining us. We wish you good luck for everything in the future, both for you and for Emeril, and thank you to you and your team for helping us put this together. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2:

It's been a pleasure. Thank you, thank you, thank you, and so that brings an end to this episode of the Middle East Construction and Real Estate Podcast. Thank you for listening to this one or any of our previous episodes. You can find our back catalogue of previous episodes on the MECRA LinkedIn page and you can listen via any of the usual ways you use for your podcasts. It would really help us if you could like or subscribe on our LinkedIn or Instagram pages. Thank you. A big thank you also, as always, to the team behind the scenes, who do all the work in preparing these podcasts, getting them edited and ready for posting for you to listen to. Please do let us know. If you have any suggestions for future topics or speakers. You can email us at nekrapodcast at gmailcom or via those social media channels. So until next time, thank you.