FM subsidiary of Chinese real estate giant strengthens its core business with bluebee®

Shanghai Green Property Management (www.keruiwy.com) is the property management subsidiary of Fortune 500 developer Greenland Group and a leading player in the burgeoning Chinese property market. Established in 2002, the company provides property management and consulting services in various types of properties including high-rise buildings, HOPSCA, residential projects, office buildings, shopping malls, school campuses, and hotels.

After decades of tremendous growth, China’s real estate market is becoming increasingly regulated, while facing the challenges of extending the life expectancy and decreasing the energy consumption of buildings. Sustainable development was set as a priority of the People Republic of China’s twelfth five-year plan, approved on March 2011.

Green Property Management, as the main operating facility management company of Greenland Group, also has to overcome human resources challenges specific to the Chinese economy: skills shortages, rising labor cost, high turnover, etc., in order to deliver the high-value services demanded by the market.

In these conditions, how to design and implement its modern “best practice”, across a large workforce, on multiple sites all over the country?

Green Property Management’s top managers have embraced the challenges and, in 2012, embarked on a project to modernize its management model. The company turned to Siveco, the country’s largest maintenance consultancy. Established in Shanghai in 2004, Siveco has developed facility management software already used on a large scale in China.

As part of the decision process, Green Property’s team visited two major Siveco clients: property management company Changcheng Property Group in Shenzhen (380 sites under management) and water infrastructure operator Sino French Water (27 joint-venture companies, most of them multisite). The visits confirmed Siveco’s ability to deliver large technology-driven projects to improve facilities management in China and helped Green Property Management to clarify its vision.

Through this initial study phase, Green Property came to the same conclusion as Siveco, as to how to best enforce a new management practice, from top management down to individual workers, gardeners, cleaner and maintenance technician, using mobile technology.

The Green Property team was quick to understand that the many property management software available in the Chinese market did not offer support for its core business (the services its employees provide on a daily basis), focusing instead on administrative processes of lesser value. While working with Siveco for its core business, Green Property selected local software suppliers for its accounting, billing, payroll management and other supporting processes.

A contract was signed at the end of 2012, to deploy Siveco’s bluebee^® solution “for the worker of tomorrow” in a phase implementation approach supporting Green Property’s management objectives.

During the initial phase of the project, Siveco consultants worked alongside Green Property management team to define a “Core Model” of best FM practices, covering both soft and hard services. The Core Model draws on Green Property’s existing practices, Siveco’s local and international experience, as well as relevant standards such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 180001. The Core Model covers guidelines for building up facilities and assets data, the definition of work processes and key performance indicators.

The bluebee^® system was then installed and configured based on the Core Model. bluebee^® is a suite of very intuitive mobile applications, designed for facilities workers, with a central management platform known as bluebee^® cloud. More than software, bluebee^® is meant as a structuring tool for the organization daily work, in the following areas:

•  Engineering and maintenance
•  Landscaping
•  Cleaning
•  Quality control
•  Overall service management

bluebee^® is designed to enforce best practices down to worker level, thanks to mandatory scanning of asset tags and taking pictures by workers or supervisors using Android mobile phones.

After a test period, the system was then deployed on three pilot sites: office building Greenland Hechuang Mansion and residential property Ladoll Plaza in Shanghai, and 450m Greenland Center – Zifeng Tower in Nanjing, the 7th highest building in the world and 2nd in mainland China. On July 18, 2013, a ceremony was held with top managers of Green Property Management to mark the official “Go Live” of bluebee^® on the three sites.

Based on the experience of the pilot sites, the use of bluebee^® is now being extended to other properties. The second batch of properties include Shanghai Metro Lines 1 and 3 (60 stations serviced by Green Property Management, with over 500 onsite staff). Ultimately the system will cover over a hundred sites, with an expected 3,000 mobile users within the next two years.

According to Zhang Yimin, the General Manager of Green Property Management:

“Our ultimate goals for implementing the bluebee^® FM solution were to upgrade our management model and to free our workforce. This informatization project proved essential to achieve these goals, as tool to:

•  Strengthen our core competitive advantages to meet market demands
•  Upgrade and standardize, systemize and streamline our current processes
•  Based on the system, train and improve the efficiency of our people
•  Based on analysis of data from the field, to improve our management
•  Reallocate our resources to focus on the most profitable business”

At this stage in the deployment of bluebee^®, Green Property Management has already experienced the benefits, such as:

•  Reduction in staffing level: thanks to the immediate efficiency improvement brought by the use of bluebee^® mobiles, a number of supervisors and site managers can be immediately redeployed to high value-added tasks, such as new customer services. New organization charts were put in place, requiring much fewer site managers than without bluebee^®.
 
•  Better management of subcontractors: subcontracting is a common practice in FM, which for the main property management company brings constant headache with quality control and work performance. Green Property subcontractors are also equipped with bluebee^® mobiles, thus ensuring they remain totally aligned with the company’s best practice.
 
•  Continuous improvement: during the pilot phase, more than 3.5 million work actions have been reported into the central bluebee^® cloud system. Data is timely and accurate, emanating directly from workers in the field. This wealth of structured information allows Green Property to analyze and benchmark its performance from one site, one team to another. On this basis, a new rewards and fine system has already been put in place.

As more and more of Green Property Management sites come under bluebee^®, benefits are expected to increase deriving from consistent quality of service, efficiency improvement on a large scale, as well as further benchmarking and better decision support. In the longer term, the impact of better working practices on buildings lifecycle and energy consumption will benefit the community as a whole.

Tags： FM、bluebee、bluebee cloud、Kerui