Introduction
Empact Group is a self-performing, multi-service provider in South Africa. The range of services provided by Empact Group spans facilities as diverse as corporate headquarters to large industrial power plants and campuses. Empact’s expertise lies in providing facilities management services for mining and the industrial sector, with an emphasis on integrating small businesses into its supply chain and delivery model.
The Challenge
Empact Group saw a clear change in the market demand with its customers looking for more integrated facility management services, which reduced its number of suppliers and raised the quality and value of its business. Empact Group customers wanted transparency and the ability to track agreed service levels and see the progress and planning of work. Empact Group set an ambitious timeline of three months to implement an Integrated Facility Management system (IFM) that would enable it to deliver the results that its customers were expecting.
Solution
After a thorough market evaluation, RfP process and demo sessions, Empact Group chose Planon for its IFM solution, with Cohesive to implement and support it.
Tshinyi Magoro, Managing Director at Empact Group says, “Cohesive’s broad experience with FM software implementations in South Africa and their knowledge of Planon was impressive. During the selection process, the strong partnership between Cohesive and Planon was very convincing. Business continuity is key for us, so we were looking for a reliable knowledge partner to support us during the full lifecycle of the solution.”
Instead of implementing the software from scratch, Cohesive took Planon’s best-practice suite called ‘Accelerator’ as a starting point. As this best practice was very well aligned with Empact’s requirements, it meant the implementation could start quickly to meet the ambitious timescales.
Tshinyi further explains the impact of the solution, “We have realized huge improvements in our operations. We have far better insights into who does what, when and where, what work is open or finished, and what costs are involved. Also, the transformation towards planned preventive maintenance changes the picture. With the digital helpdesk now included as part of our service, most customers could stop their own internal helpdesks. Reports and analytics help us to continuously optimize the performance of our operations and the quality of our services. In that sense, Planon Universe has become the engine of our business”.
Planon has enabled Empact Group to better integrate its service offering, including a closed-loop digital connection with specialized partners in the regions. This allows it to scale projects at a higher pace, reduce costs for its customers, and enter new regions and markets successfully.
By using Planon, Empact can now showcase, with live dashboards, its performance to customers on a real-time basis. Customers can easily track agreed service levels, see the progress and planning of work and much more. This creates trust in the relationship and saves a huge amount of time and effort compared to manual reporting.
Client Benefits
The asset management system now supports the Front Office, New Connections and CRM streams of the business with the data sets from the pre-existing systems being merged, with the roles and responsibilities being altered to take into consideration the new functionality.
The main objective of the replacement project was to improve the efficiency of the engineering function at SGN and reduce the customisations in place. This was achieved by:
- Merging the data sets into one database
- Consolidating the business processes
- Moving Java and other older functionality into Automation Scripts
- Using New Maximo 7.5.05 functionality
- Aligning the Maximo and Syclo validations
- Providing enhanced infrastructure configurations
