Research Manager, Enterprise Asset Management & Smart Facilities
Program Vice President, Enterprise Applications and Digital Commerce
Major Players
Accruent
Eptura
JLL Technologies
MRI Software
Spacewell
Tango
Participants
FM:Systems
Leaders
IBM
Nuvolo
PlanonFeatured Vendor
ServiceChannel
Maintenance and facility management (FM) software is designed to automate, optimize, and increasingly anticipate facility maintenance, operational, and service needs. This IDC MarketScape for worldwide SaaS and cloud-enabled enterprise maintenance and facility management applications helps enterprises with 1,000+ employees evaluate the maintenance and facility management applications market landscape. It is a busy market, and buyers have a wide selection of vendors to consider.
From the remote workforce through to digital commerce, virtual classrooms, and telehealth services, the past two years have reset an organization’s thinking of the role of facilities and physical assets. Despite low occupancy rates in some places due to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations are investing in buildings and workplaces to deliver outstanding experiences when employees, customers, students, patients, and other visitors are onsite. For so long, facility conditions were taken for granted because workers had to come to the office to do their jobs, customers could only shop by going to a brick-and-mortar store, students went to their school building to learn, and patients had to go see their doctor in person at a location. Now that people have more options to interact and transact in the digital world, virtually facilities are being used more for collaboration, in-person communication, and tangible connections that require a physical presence. Because time onsite is more precious than ever, the state of facilities and maintenance of equipment reflect greater on organizational brand and culture.
Maintenance and facility management software vendors are releasing product updates, forming new partnerships, and acquiring technologies to keep up with the digital, hybrid, and remote worlds. In addition to reactive and preventative maintenance, vendors deliver a range of spare parts inventory, vendor management, work scheduling, sanitization, inspection, capital planning, and reporting features. These demands and others are placing more on the future of smart facilities such that it is driving software applications to expand building systems integration, smart assets, predictive analytics and, ultimately, autonomous building functionality. Organizations must think about key areas that distinguish SaaS and cloud-enabled maintenance and facility management application vendors both today and tomorrow. All of it encompasses customer engagement, configurability, vendor management, IoT, and enterprise intelligence — to name just a few capabilities and innovations aspect continuously evolving.
For large enterprises investing in long-term solutions, SaaS and cloud-enabled maintenance and facility management applications become a multiyear relationship. Decision makers investing in these applications need 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, provide ongoing support, and listen to feedback. Implementation teams often highlight when a vendor increased their trust and dependency on them by guiding them on making early decisions to avoid major pitfalls down the road or when a partner was especially helpful in preparing data sets for the new system. Customers also rated vendors highly when they could see their feedback implemented in the product updates, were given opportunities to participate in customer advisory boards, and were provided with exceptional training and thought leadership from the vendor. Last, vendors may distinguish commercially by offering flexible packages, providing transparency in pricing, and the process for renegotiating major 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 maintenance and facility management application provides mechanisms for altering out-of-the-box workflows, such as defining approval processes, generating email alerts, and sending invoices to the financial application. Purchase decision makers should evaluate how much can be configured via the user interface or low-code/no-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. Configurability when done right not only saves time and money for the customer but also enhances the value they receive overall from their partner.
Enterprises have always relied on facility and maintenance vendors, especially those that are geographically dispersed, where keeping local staff on payroll for each craft makes little sense. With skilled labor shortages, fluctuating service needs, and on-demand business models, external service providers are critical to enterprises. Organizations are increasingly tracking in-house and third-party work in one software system to capture performance metrics, such as first-time fix rates, timeliness, responsiveness, and quality, and compare to service-level agreements (SLAs). Maintenance and facility management software can track hourly rates, total work order costs, and other operating expenses, which when integrated with other enterprise applications, can automate invoicing, payments, accounting, financial reporting, and so on. Some software products even include service provider databases, insurance verification, compliance records, and aggregated benchmarks to monitor results against others, drive proposal recommendations, and optimize vendor portfolios. The sky is the limit in this new world of services, so products that enable a better customer experience enable stickiness for the long haul.
Facilities, and the assets contained within, 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. Maintenance and facility management application providers are currently delivering, or planning to deliver, some level of IoT offering through third-party integration, partnerships, building their own technology, or purchase capabilities via an acquisition. Many are seeking to leverage real-time and historic IoT data to improve occupant experiences, such as indicating which conference rooms are currently unoccupied, setting up the ability to reduce heat or air-conditioning when not needed, or turning off lighting that is not in use. Some are focusing more on predictive maintenance and autonomous buildings, such as notifying technicians to potential problems or adjusting settings based on actual usage. Others are taking building information modeling (BIM), often generated during design and construction, and using it to generate updated representations of a physical facility, essentially a building digital twin.
Dynamic conditions, constantly changing external environments, wide-ranging facility use, varied equipment performance, and inconsistent occupant behavior all drive autonomy in facility and maintenance operations. Even with IoT creating smarter facilities, it’s impossible for people to keep up with it all today. Enterprise intelligence helps preserve human intervention where it is most valuable and shift other responsibilities to artificial intelligence (AI) with autonomous facilities. Organizations can start by considering each major facility and maintenance workflow and evaluating the appropriateness of partial or full machine control. Technology vendors can help large enterprises implement an autonomous facility, which optimizes the organization’s priorities for that place and time, accounting for factors such as productivity, quality, comfort, safety, security, well-being, consumption, efficiency, and sustainability.
Facility management applications are evolving rapidly as vendors invest in updating their software to deliver on organization’s desired outcomes around operational excellence, resiliency, and occupant experience. 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 accelerators, an essential part of any technology purchasing decisions, was thus a guiding factor in assessing vendors’ current capabilities in addition to strategic direction. Buyers are looking for a technology partner that can rise to the complex and dynamic demands of today, as well as take them into the future. When choosing a vendor now, ask how it is planning to support the mobile and remote operations, its game plan for integrating with building systems, and what its strategy is for IoT with regard to assets and equipment. Evaluate whether and when it will apply true artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive capabilities to areas such as inventory ordering, work scheduling, vendor performance management, and capital planning. You may think your organization is not ready for these innovations yet. However, based on the increasing rate of change and the effort to deploy a maintenance and facility management application, large enterprises in particular need to select a product and vendor that can deliver at scale today and be a long-term partner as business and technology evolves.
Several vendors outlined in this study have focused their applications on office, workplace, or retail settings, while others serve organizations across many industries such as education, 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 assists in answering the aforementioned questions and others. The goal of this document is to provide potential software customers with a list of maintenance and 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 teams responsible for maintaining their organization’s facilities, assets, and equipment.
This section briefly explains IDC’s key observations resulting in a vendor’s position in the IDC MarketScape. While every vendor is evaluated against each of the criteria outlined in the Appendix, the description here provides a summary of each vendor’s strengths and challenges.
After a thorough evaluation of Planon’s strategies and capabilities, IDC has positioned the company in the Leaders category in this 2022-2023 IDC MarketScape for worldwide SaaS and cloud-enabled enterprise maintenance and facility management applications.
Planon is a global provider of real estate, maintenance, and facility management software that enables digitalization by integrating smart building technology and data with business processes. Planon’s Maintenance Management Solution is used by building owners and occupiers at multinational organizations, local businesses, and service contractors for reactive, preventative, and predictive maintenance. It provides capabilities for asset life-cycle management, work order tickets, resource management, budgeting, inventory management, field service execution, contract and warranty management, and health, safety, and hazard management, as well as occupant services such as space management, space reservations, and sanitization tracking. Planon has a CMMS and FM version for small and medium-sized businesses — the Planon Maintenance Edition, which can be upgraded to its full Enterprise Solution. Planon’s open application platform and embedded IoT services enable integrations with a wide range of third-party technologies and data sources and automate business responses to IoT-generated events. Planon has a business and technology partnership with Schneider Electric for convergence of real-time building data and AI-driven analytics.
Consider Planon if you are a global enterprise or midmarket business and are looking for a CMMS or facility management solution with an open platform strategy and digitally enabled asset visualization.
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 a 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.
SaaS and cloud-enabled maintenance and facility management applications support the operational profile of commercial buildings, industrial facilities, and related outdoor sites as well as the maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) operations for the physical assets and equipment residing within its facilities. The software enables day-to-day operations and long-range planning of buildings and workplaces, including capabilities to digitally automate work order management, reactive maintenance, preventative maintenance, inspections, spare parts inventory management, vendor management, warranty tracking, facility service delivery, and sanitization.
