Is Facilities-iQ Worth The ROI & Value For Money?

Whether you’ve heard of SFG20 or you’ve just come across it for the first time, you’re probably wondering: “Is investing my time and money in Facilities-iQ actually worth it? What’s in it for me?” 

The short answer is that if you don’t have an active SFG20 subscription, then you may well be mitigating risk ineffectively and would benefit from investing in Facilities-iQ to achieve your compliance goals. 

The long answer contained in this article is that there are a variety of additional time and cost savings that will make your job far easier. For example, client SO FM made a 20% cost saving across its maintenance activities, a saving that represented far more than the cost of Facilities-iQ. 

Read on to learn how Facilities-iQ can benefit your business, and the return you might expect from investing in the software solution.  

The Compliance Angle: Why Do You Need Facilities-iQ? 

Let’s address the elephant in the room: your risk. If you weren’t aware, non-compliance can and does result in prison time.

The Building Safety Regulator fines an average of £150,000, and contractual breaches can land you in court leading to reputational damage. Where there's negligence, this can lead to harm or even loss of life - all in all, there's an unimaginable amount of guilt and psychological fallout involved with non-compliance.   

If you’re not convinced, check out our Top 5 Building Maintenance Non-Compliance Risks for more information and case studies of what happened to real companies and professionals who believed they could just ignore their responsibilities.   

Facilities-iQ uses SFG20’s library of maintenance schedules to assist you in creating compliant maintenance regimes. You access the SFG20 standard using Facilities-iQ, which allows you to achieve compliance in just a couple of clicks.

To give you an idea of how much work this would be to do yourself, SFG20 employ a full-time team of technical authors to maintain the standard which is then updated each month. There can easily be as many as 700 total updates in a 6-month period, so keeping up with legislation, recommendations, regulations and best practice on top of your job is incredibly time-consuming and complex to do on your own. 

It’s a 4 step process that requires our technical authoring team to review Primary and Secondary legislation in addition to approved codes of practice and distil that information into the practical maintenance schedules that make up the SFG20 standard. 

Many of our customers use Facilities-iQ to augment their team of compliance professionals because even with the extra resource, the task of keeping up to date with the latest legislation by yourself is simply too great.  

The ROI Angle: Why Facilities-iQ Saves You Money Long-Term 

Let’s be honest, maintenance is often an afterthought when it comes to spending, and many maintenance professionals have to work hard to defend their budgets. The money issue then bleeds into maintenance strategies which can become reactive to an unhealthy and even illegal degree.  

Organisations end up cutting maintenance spend thinking they will save money, when in reality they are drastically raising future costs. This is because undermaintained assets become less efficient, consume more energy and fail prematurely. 

Facilities-iQ actually leads to cost savings down the road as you futureproof your assets through routine maintenance and thus avoid unexpected and costly repairs or inefficiencies.  

Another key cost-saving advantage is that Facilities-iQ tells you which maintenance tasks are statutory (a legal requirement) and which tasks are not. This allows you to refocus your efforts to trim out unnecessary tasks, saving time, resource and ultimately money, helping your maintenance budget go further.

Facilities-iQ can also help you save resource costs and their associated carbon emissions. This is because you can group together tasks that require the same skill set, resulting in fewer site visits. You can also use the software to assess your resources and determine which tasks require external expertise and which can be completed internally - a great cost saver!

One of our recent clients Mathew Houghton of Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust divulged that Facilities-iQ saved them the cost of hiring an additional compliance professional. Given the average annual salary for a Compliance Officer can run anywhere from £35,000-£60,000, that’s quite the saving! 

But wait. there’s more! No really! 

A Compliance Officer revealed to us he was able to use SFG20 to audit a maintenance contract which stipulated that maintenance engineers must carry out statutory maintenance. He discovered the contractor was not delivering on a large percentage of their statutory PPMs, allowing him to impose 5 figure fines every month. In the end, he managed to save his employer £2m on an £11m contract!  

The Time Angle: What Clients Are Telling Us  

Time is one of the biggest obstacles for busy Facilities professionals – interpreting the latest legislation and formatting such updates into compliant maintenance schedules is no easy task, let alone carrying out those tasks in an effective and efficient manner.  

It can feel like “two of me would have been easier”, as our client Mathew Houghton from Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust put it. You then get put in the difficult position of trying to find room in the budget to take on another professional to support you, which is far from easy because maintenance, as we all know, is rarely a financial priority.  

One of the most overlooked aspects of Facilities-iQ then, is how much time the software can put back in your pocket. Mathew told us that Facilities-iQ saves him roughly 7.5hrs of work a week, a time saving that also helped him avoid the cost of having to hire a compliance professional.

Before implementing Facilities-iQ, Mathew was reviewing SFG20 updates himself and having to make manual adjustments to his maintenance plans, an incredibly laborious process. With Facilities-iQ’s automatic updates feature, Mathew can implement updates in just a couple of clicks, saving him hours of manual data entry. 

That’s an entire day back or 20% out of a 5-day work week! Just imagine what you could do with an extra day to play with. 

Return On Investment Summary 

So, how do the benefits outweigh the costs? The benefits we’ve discussed so far are: 

Achieve Compliance: 

• Get access to Compliant maintenance schedules, updated monthly by SFG20’s full-time team of highly experienced and accredited Technical Authors who provide you with clear guidance on your statutory and non-statutory tasks, along with frequencies and required skill sets.  
• You can stop worrying about compliance. It’s in our tagline: Our iQ, your peace of mind.
  

Save Money: 

• Energy savings – maximise the efficiency of your assets through proper maintenance to reduce energy consumption.  
• Asset replacement - maximise the lifespan of your assets through appropriate maintenance and reduce the frequency at which you replace them. 
• Asset repair – minimise the amount you spend on asset repairs through regular maintenance.  
• Unnecessary tasks – Facilities-iQ tells you which tasks you have to legally perform, allowing you to trim out low-risk, non-statutory tasks if necessary and thus save money. 
• Resource – Facilities-iQ allows you to focus your resources more efficiently, reducing expenses. 
• Personnel – Facilities-iQ gives you access to the insight of a team of full-time compliance professionals for a fraction of the cost of hiring just one Compliance Officer. 

• Time – You will save the cost of considerable man-hours expended on creating and updating maintenance schedules and carrying out maintenance tasks. 
• Contracts – Use SFG20 to nail down exactly what works will be carried out. 
  

Save Time:

• Gain back hours or even days out of your weekly schedule  
• Stop feeling like you are doing the work of two people! 
  
  

PLUS: the above factors have the potential to save you more money than you spent on Facilities-iQ in the first place, meaning you will see a significant return on investment in the long term.

We're Here For All Of Your Questions

For many SFG20 customers, the cumulative windfall of time and cost savings adds up to considerably more than the price of an SFG20 license, rewarding you with a significant ROI in the long term. 

BUT…what is that price? 

It’s all very well us telling you it’s possible to save more money than you spend on Facilities-iQ, but how much is the software? 

For a full pricing breakdown, hit the button below to book a meeting with one of our knowledgeable product experts. 

Let's Talk Pricing