Emrill’s operations director, Gopalakrishnan talks to Construction Week about how the FM services have not “really changed” since the pandemic.
With over a year into the pandemic, the demand for sanitisation and sterilisation services have seen a massive spike, and UAE-based integrated facilities management services provider Emrill’s operations director, Gopalakrishnan told Construction Week that the firm has seen a rise in interest among its clients to be involved in the delivery of facilities management.
Reflecting on the change in clients involvement, Gopalakrishnan said: “One shift we have observed across the entire sector is clients want to be more involved in the delivery of facilities management. We have taken this opportunity to further educate our clients about the importance of applying world-class cleaning standards in every environment.”
Same methodologies, different applications
However, the operations director highlighted that the services facilities management providers are offering have not “really changed”.
“At Emrill, we are still using the same methodologies we always have, but we are now using them in different applications.”
Talking about how the company has changed the way it operates since the pandemic, Gopalakrishnan said: “While the services we offer have not changed, we have certainly had to change how we work and live. We have an ethos of expecting the unexpected, which plays a big part in our overarching theme of being future-ready, so we had robust contingency plans in place before COVID-19 struck. “
He added: “While it was crucial we responded to changing regulations and ensured the most up-to-date materials and methodologies were provided, we have also recognised the importance of our employees’ mental health in what has been an incredibly challenging year.”
Training and development
The company has also provided learning and development opportunities to its employees.
“In addition to launching a new frontline supervisor training module, we adapted our existing programmes, which saw us migrate to 100% paperless learning, reduce our classroom sizes for in-person learning, provide more virtual learning via webinar and online facilities and offer virtual mentoring sessions.”
According to Gopalakrishnan, in the last twelve months, Emrill achieved 20.2 million safe man-hours, promoted 998 employees, and delivered 22,005 learning sessions.
Integrating technology
In the past twelve months, Emrill has rolled out several new technologies and innovations that have helped the FM giant overcome the challenges of COVID-19 and continue to deliver hard facilities management services.
Gopalakrishnan told Construction Week that the company has ensured that the initiatives it puts in place “ultimately increase efficiency and adds real value” to its clients.
The FM firm has been using its Effy App to increase the efficiency of housekeeping and soft facilities management service delivery. The company has launched another web and mobile-based app to assist technicians in the field, where they can use their mobile devices to access all information relating to any asset, including manuals, references, contact information for special, approved services providers, and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) diagrams.
Emrill has also expanded the capabilities of FSI Go, its CAFM platform, to ensure the optimum usage of the CAFM mobile apps. Additionally, it has implemented geo-fencing to optimise waste management.
“We have installed sensor technology on street and community lighting in the communities we manage. These sensors detect disruptions and outages, identifying which sector they have occurred in, enabling us to proactively restore power or change bulbs, instead of waiting to receive a complaint from residents. This is especially important to critical lights, where an outage poses a safety risk,” added Gopalakrishnan.
According to Emrill’s operations director, with the integration of technology, the company is “redefining” how technical and hard facilities management services are delivered to its clients.
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