Research Manager, Enterprise Asset Management and Smart Facilities for IDC
Major Players
Akitabox
Dude Solutions
FMX
Spacewell
Contenders
Fexa
Leaders
Planon
ServiceChannel
SpaceIQ
NuvoloFeatured Vendor
Accruent
Facility management applications are designed to automate, improve, and, in an ideal world, anticipate facility maintenance, operational, and service needs. This IDC MarketScape helps organizations evaluate the facility management application market landscape. It is a busy market, and buyers have a wide selection of vendors to choose from.
Facility management software vendors are already adjusting their capabilities and strategies as all industry verticals explore hybrid work models and ways to enhance facilities with digital tools. In addition to reactive and preventative maintenance, vendors deliver a range of spare part inventory, vendor management, work scheduling, sanitization, health, safety, inspection, and reporting features. While computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) cater mainly to the technicians and managers responsible for executing asset and equipment upkeep, facility management applications must also serve the people in the space. Depending upon how you will use the system, IDC suggests looking at additional workplace management functionality, such as space management, service delivery, event management, visitor management, lease administration, capital planning, and energy and sustainability.
Growth in instrumented, interconnected, and flexible smart facilities will impact the applications organizations need to manage these intelligent physical spaces. Vendors are making progress in their ability to ingest real-time facility performance data, interpret information, anticipate issues, and make recommendations, with some more advanced than others. From thorough briefings, demos, and customer reference interviews for each vendor in this study, IDC sees certain facility management application providers moving boldly toward the future digital enterprise. These vendors are going beyond ticketing systems and workflow automation to bring in more of the data about facility operations, occupant behavior, and equipment performance. To identify vendors with well-formed strategies, look for clear product road maps, partnerships, or acquisitions intended to deliver more connected, IoT-driven, and intelligent innovations to facility management functions.
The demands of future smart facilities will drive facility management applications to expand building systems integration, digital models, predictive analytics, and ultimately autonomous building functionality. Organizations must think about key areas that distinguish SaaS facility management application vendors both today and tomorrow, which are customer relationships, configurability, mobility, location intelligence, IoT, and vision.
SaaS turns a facility management software deployment into a multiyear relationship. Purchase decision makers should look for a vendor that feels as much a cultural fit for their organization as a technical fit. Many customer references talk about whether they trust the vendor to deliver on their promises and provide the best experiences. Some end users expressed delight with the little things that their customer success manager does for them or when a random feature that they requested shows up on the product road map. Often, it comes down to the commitment and expertise of the vendors’ staff, how they guide customers during and after implementation to avoid common pitfalls, and the way they treat customers when it’s time for renegotiating contracts.
Applications should readily conform to an organization’s workflows, nomenclature, and roles. Organizations should have the ability to quickly modify existing fields, add new fields, and rearrange fields on different views, as well as report on custom data points. Further, a modern facility management application provides mechanisms for altering out-of-the-box workflows, such as defining approval processes, generating email alerts, and sending invoices to a financial application. Purchase decision makers should evaluate how much can be configured via the user interface or low-code tools without writing custom code. When a system is truly configurable, all customers can be on the same code base but still have the product work the way they want. Otherwise, organizations end up adjusting procedures to fit a rigid application or paying ongoing professional services fees to customize and maintain workarounds.
In facility management, mobility is increasingly important for occupants, ranging from employees, students, visitors, patients, and customers, as well as technicians responsible for maintenance. The COVID-19 pandemic imposed physical restrictions that quickly drove organizations to more remote operations. With a desire for contactless workflows, organizations are turning to the personal devices in an individual’s hand. At least in the short term, facility teams are moving away from shared objects, such as touchscreens, and human interaction, like a staffed reception desk. In the long term, hybrid work models will mean more people are on the go and will need mobile access to generate work orders, plan their facility in advance, and coordinate enterprise services. Greater investment in mobile experiences will be a strategic imperative for vendors in this area as more and more activities go remote.
One emerging frontier is the integration between facility management systems, geospatial data sets, and location intelligence analytics. Knowing and using the location of people, equipment, and work orders adds rich context to the occupant experience and upkeep of physical workplaces. Already many vendors enable reporting issues, making space reservations, or requesting services directly from a map, storing the location coordinates with the record. Potential digital transformation use cases include wayfinding to a destination, tracking the location where a moveable asset is deployed, and overlaying 2D or 3D models with real-time location information. For example, an employee can use indoor mapping to navigate to the room or desk they booked or facilities teams can use location analytics to plan for and respond to natural disasters. There are exciting possibilities but also challenges with privacy and cultural acceptance. Organizations will want to harness the promise of location intelligence while not letting the potential get ahead of the practical.
Facilities can generate a lot of data about their performance, consumption, compliance, asset movements, occupant behavior, and so on. Organizations are retrofitting existing facilities with new sensors, meters, video systems, and other edge devices. New campuses are designed and constructed with the latest intelligent assets, building automation systems, and IoT solutions. Software companies are creating entire new businesses just from connecting, unifying, and analyzing all the disparate data and systems. Each facility management application provider is already or planning to integrate, partner, build, or purchase capabilities related to IoT. Many are seeking to leverage real time and historic IoT data to improve occupant experiences, such as indicating which conference rooms are currently unoccupied. Some are focusing more on predictive maintenance and autonomous buildings, such as notifying technicians to potential problems or adjusting temperatures based on actual usage. Others are taking building information modeling (BIM), often generated during design and construction, and using to generate updated representations of a physical facility, essentially a building digital twin.
This IDC MarketScape evaluates the vendors, not just their products. Facility management vendors differ in their strategies as much as their capabilities (refer back to Figure 1). Some are effectively leveraging partnerships and a broader ecosystem to bring more value to customers, while others are creating new digital visualizations, redesigning for mobile experiences, or updating their cloud architecture and delivery. The road maps and strategies shared with IDC demonstrated a wide range of what vendors believe customers will prioritize in the future. A product road map is a set of commitments to customers and a statement about where the software provider is focusing its energy. While many vendors are hitting on a few key areas, only some are pulling it all together in a comprehensive and compelling vision.
Facility management applications are evolving rapidly as vendors invest research and development dollars into bolstering, augmenting and, in some cases, redesigning their software. As a result, it is extremely important for end users to understand how vendors and their software are positioned currently as well as how they may be situated in the next three to five years. Organizations typically make a multiyear commitment to their facility management applications because the investment to migrate the data, configure workflows, integrate with adjacent systems, and train a broad user base is high. Thus it is vital to evaluate the software vendor’s strategy, road map, and responsiveness to customer feedback in addition to the vendor’s present features and functionality.
Innovation is an essential part of the “buy” decision, so a guiding factor in our vendor research was the 3rd Platform and innovation accelerator current capabilities in addition to the strategic direction. Buyers are looking for a technology partner that can rise to the complex, agile, and remote demands of today, as well as take them into the future. When choosing a vendor now, ask how it is planning to support the hybrid workplace, its game plan for integrating with building systems, and what its strategy is for IoT in the facility. Evaluate if and when it will apply true artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and predictive capabilities to areas like inventory ordering, work scheduling, vendor performance management, capital planning, and space utilization. You may think your organization is not ready for these innovations now, but given the pace of change today and the time and effort, it will take to deploy a new facility management application and you will be best served selecting a vendor future proofing its products.
Several vendors outlined in this study have focused their facility management on specific education or retail verticals, while others serve organizations across many industries such as commercial office, healthcare, public sector, and property management clients. The vendors vary in terms of size, experience, levels of support, sales model, and focus on the market. Ultimately, it is about choosing a vendor that best suits your needs, delivers on its promises, and is continually innovating.
Following are a few key steps in the journey to select the right fit among the myriad of software vendors:
This IDC MarketScape vendor assessment assists in answering the aforementioned questions and others. The goal of this document is to provide potential software customers with a list of facility management application vendors that have taken great strides to incorporate the previously listed capabilities. We have profiled and assessed their capabilities and strategies to support the broad needs of facility management.
After a thorough evaluation of Nuvolo’s strategies and capabilities, IDC has positioned the company in the Leaders category in this IDC MarketScape for worldwide SaaS computerized maintenance management system applications.
Nuvolo, founded in 2014, automates work order management, preventative maintenance, spare parts inventory, and inspections. Nuvolo has capabilities to manage vendors, warranties, and regulatory compliance across a variety of industries, especially healthcare, life sciences, and food retail. Nuvolo offers a configurable application, which includes mobile technician and field service management functionality for workload balancing, scheduling, and route optimization. In addition, Nuvolo enables live asset tracking and extends its CMMS capabilities with OT cybersecurity for protecting connected non-IT devices. Nuvolo’s application is a single system and code base, built from the ground up on ServiceNow’s NOW platform. Nuvolo received Series C funding in March 2021 and is investing in product development, expanding its staff and offices globally, and partnerships with Deloitte, Accenture, and Fujitsu.
Consider Nuvolo if you are a large enterprise or midmarket business. You are likely looking for a configurable CMMS with field service management capabilities. You might also consider Nuvolo if you are already using ServiceNow.
The vendor inclusion list for this evaluation was selected to accurately depict the vendors that are most representative of any given facility management application on buyer’s selection list based on the following:
For the purposes of this analysis, IDC divided potential key measures for success into two primary categories: capabilities and strategies.
Positioning on the y-axis reflects the vendor’s current capabilities and menu of services and how well aligned the vendor is to customer needs. The capabilities category focuses on the capabilities of the company and product today, here and now. Under this category, IDC analysts will look at how well a vendor is building/delivering capabilities that enable it to execute its chosen strategy in the market.
Positioning on the x-axis, or strategies axis, indicates how well the vendor’s future strategy aligns with what customers will require in three to five years. The strategies category focuses on high-level decisions and underlying assumptions about offerings, customer segments, and business and go-to-market plans for the next three to five years.
The size of the individual vendor markers in the IDC MarketScape represents the market share of each individual vendor within the specific market segment being assessed.
IDC MarketScape criteria selection, weightings, and vendor scores represent well-researched IDC judgment about the market and specific vendors. IDC analysts tailor the range of standard characteristics by which vendors are measured through structured discussions, surveys, and interviews with market leaders, participants, and end users. Market weightings are based on user interviews, buyer surveys, and the input of IDC experts in each market. IDC analysts base individual vendor scores, and ultimately vendor positions on the IDC MarketScape, on detailed surveys and interviews with the vendors, publicly available information, and end-user experiences in an effort to provide an accurate and consistent assessment of each vendor’s characteristics, behavior, and capability.
Facility management applications support the maintenance and operational profile of commercial buildings, industrial facilities, and related outdoor sites. The software enables day-to-day operations and long-range planning of buildings and workplaces, including maintenance, service delivery, sanitization, and vendor management.
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