Introducing SFG20 Optimiser: Identify Maintenance Costs, Compare Approaches and Deliver with Confidence

Introduction and Welcome

Michael: Hello, everyone. My name is Michael Campbell from SFG20, and I'm joined today by my colleague, Ben Cullen.

Ben: Hi, everyone. I'm Ben. Um, I head up the Product Engineering function here at SFG20. Thanks, Ben.

Michael: Uh, between us, we're gonna share with you today SFG20 Optimiser, the latest exciting development in SFG20's increasing portfolio of solutions that are changing the way in which facilities are managed up and down the country and increasingly globally.

SFG20 Optimiser is our brand-new enhancement that is going to change the way in which FM functions define their budgets and shape their outsourcing requirements. Just to let you know before we begin, we'd like to encourage all of our participants to interact in our webinars. You can do this by taking part in our upcoming polls, which will come up on the right-hand side of your screen.

If you have any questions at all during the webinar, please put them into the chat or in the Q&A tab, also found on the right-hand side of the screen, and we will answer them in the Q&A section of the webinar. If you weren't able to answer your question today, don't worry. We will respond to your query via the email you provided when you registered for this webinar. First of all, if any of our audience today is unfamiliar with SFG20, we were formed in 1990 to fill a gap in the market, the requirement for a standard for compliant and best practice maintenance of equipment and assets.

Now, SFG20 is recognised as the industry standard for building maintenance specification, used and advocated by thousands of customers worldwide, including supporting facilities managers, building owners, FM contractors, and consultants. Over the years, the standard has evolved from a book to a PDF available on a CD-ROM, then web hosted, hosted in an application until most recently delivered via a SaaS solution called Facilities-iQ.

Facilities-iQ doesn't just host the standard, it turns it into an integral part of an organisation's operational delivery. Inside Facilities-iQ, you'll find an extensive library of over fifteen hundred expertly authored building maintenance schedules, which could be used to maintain all assets within a multitude of building types.

Where appropriate, you can tailor the standard to your specific asset context, construct maintenance regimes that define the maintenance required to support your buildings, and integrate these into your downstream FM systems such as CAFM, IWMS, or CMMS via our API. SFG20's full-time team of technical authors create and upkeep the standard in line with current legislation, regulations and standards, translating complex legislative information into actionable maintenance schedules.

Whenever the SFG20 standard changes, we provide automated update notifications and give you a side-by-side comparison of what's changed and allow you to implement these changes at a time that best suits you. Facilities-iQ tells you what maintenance is required, by whom, and when. Until now, it couldn't tell you what that maintenance would cost to deliver.

SFG20 Optimiser is our brand-new enhancement to Facilities-iQ that is going to change the way in which FM functions define their budgets and shape their outsourcing requirements. SFG20 Optimiser marries the SFG20 maintenance standard with your asset context to deliver accurate maintenance cost forecasts.

It helps calculate the cost to maintain facilities, compare alternative approaches, and make better-informed maintenance decisions. You can apply your own labour models, rate cards, commercial assumptions, and delivery rules, then compare different scenarios before committing to a budget, contract, or operational change.

SFG20 Optimiser's rules engine lets you define how your organisation delivers maintenance and apply that approach consistently across every cost model. We've heard from building owner occupiers that they experience the following three challenges. Firstly, there's budget setting. Setting annual maintenance budgets is usually a poorly informed and largely Excel-based process.

The lack of visibility of the true cost to maintain an asset portfolio means the annual PPM budget put forward can be little more than a best guess, and is often last year's number plus or minus a small variance. This can lead to exposure in year when the FM team is tasked to achieve more with less.

Outsourcing is also a common challenge. This is because issuing contracts for tender is a task commonly undertaken as something of a leap of faith. With no benchmark for what a compliant level of PPM should cost, it's difficult to evaluate bids and be sure that you're shortlisting and ultimately selecting a supplier who's going to deliver a service that is both value for money and compliant.

And finally, there's the financial impact of change. SFG20 updates its standard from time to time to reflect changes in legislation and best practice. A building owner's asset estate is rarely static. The cost of these changes is often unquantified and can result in a lack of compliance, assurance, and/or available budget.

In short, the requirement is for greater governance, transparency, and evidence. Before we move on, we'd love to hear from you. Let's bring up our first poll. In your experience, when budgets are constrained, which work is most likely to be delayed? We'll give everyone a, a moment to submit your responses. You can choose more than one option in all of our polls.

And hot on its heels, poll two: how concerned are you that deferred maintenance could lead to a compliance or safety issue?

SFG20 Optimiser addresses these challenges head on. It enables you to build evidence-based maintenance budgets, create an internal cost benchmark before going to market and compare bids against a should-cost model, and undertake rapid recalculation when assets or the SFG20 standard changes. We're now gonna take a look at SFG20 Optimiser in action. Over to you, Ben.

Ben: Everything in Optimiser starts from work you've already done in Facilities-iQ. This is our demo estate, seven buildings and around three and a half thousand asset records. Every asset type has been mapped to its SFG20 schedule through Mobiliser, so there's nothing left to do. From that register, we've built a maintenance regime tailored to the estate and promoted it to candidate, the stage before it's signed off and published.

It already tells us the effort: around two thousand two hundred working days a year of red tasks, nineteen hundred of amber, and just eighty-one of green. The tasks SFG20 leaves for you to decide, the unspecified frequencies, have all been set, so we know what maintenance the estate needs and how much of it.

What we don't yet know is what it costs. That's Optimiser's job. Optimiser works in four stages: map the SFG20 skills to the trades that do your work, put a price on those trades, build a costed scenario, then model variants to test what happens when you change the rules. Let's take them in turn. First, skills.

SFG20 describes every task by the skill it needs, and there are more than seventy of them. A skill map says which of your trades carries out each one. You can start from SFG20 standard mapping, start from scratch, or copy a map you already have. Most people start from the standard one. Here's ours: fourteen trades built from the standard mapping.

For a building owner, that's a mix of your in-house roles and the contractors you use for everything else. Any skill that isn't mapped to a trade is flagged, so nothing quietly drops out of the costing. Changing it takes seconds. Here we add a specialist fire contractor and give them two fire skills, which move across from the trade that had them before.

Removing a trade warns you if any skills would be left without one, and renaming a trade to match your own language is a single edit. A skill map can also split one skill between two trades. Say routine electrical work stays with your in-house electrician, but statutory inspection and testing goes to an approved contractor.

We add the contractor as a trade and give them the high voltage work outright, then rename the existing trade so it's clear which is which. Then on the electrical skill, we add a routing rule. If a task is red, meaning it's a legal requirement, and it's done annually or less often, it goes to the contractor.

Everything else stays with the in-house team, which remains the default. The branch icon marks any trade with routing rules, and every scenario costs each trade at its own rate. Next, rates. A rate card puts a price on each trade. 'Cause we've just changed the skill map, the card that uses it is flagged for review, and it tells you exactly why.

Our new contractor has no rate yet, so we give them theirs, sixty-eight pounds an hour. Then we dismiss the review. For a building owner, the rates are your direct costs for work you do in-house and your suppliers' prices for work you outsource or a blend of the two trade by trade. Where one skill costs more or less than the rest of its trade, you can override it.

Here, the general electrical skill has its own rate. Some work is already covered by a fixed price contract. Gas is on an annual term contract here, so we switch the trade to a fixed annual cost and enter the contract value, twenty thousand pounds a year. Modifiers apply across the whole card. Think management fees or overheads.

Here we add a ten percent management fee. Anything more targeted, like an uplift for one trade or one site, is done with a rule, which we'll come to. You can keep as many rate cards as you need for different regions, suppliers or pricing strategies. It's a good way to compare quotes, one card per supplier, and the same scenario costed against each.

Now we bring it together. A scenario takes a maintenance regime, which says what work is needed, and a rate card, which says what each hour of it costs. For every task, that's its hours, times how often it's done in a year, times the rate for the trade that does it, with modifiers and minimum billing on top.

And there's a fully costed baseline for the whole estate, three point two million pounds a year. That's two point nine million of trade costs, the twenty thousand pound gas contract, and the management fee. It breaks down by building, so we can see White Building six and Blue Building one carry the most cost.

And by criticality, one and a half million on red tasks, which are the statutory ones, and one point three million on amber, which keep assets working as designed. It shows how often the work happens and the cost by trade, by type of maintenance, right down to individual assets. Every calculation also carries notes.

Here, four tasks have no duration, so they add no cost. And if a rate, a mapping, or a rule changes, the notes tell you the scenario is out of date with a button to recalculate. Nothing is hidden, and nothing needs re-entering. For a building owner, that's the evidence behind a budget or a should-cost benchmark before you go to market.

But the first number is seldom the final number, and that's where Optimiser comes into its own. Rule sets are how we model change. Each one is a set of rules that decide which tasks are included, excluded, or adjusted. We already have two. Silver drops the green tasks, the ones that are good practice but optional, and this is the out-of-hours uplift.

Blue Building one is occupied around the clock, so planned maintenance there happens out of hours. One rule, every task at Blue Building one costs fifteen percent more, and the reason is recorded against it. Preview it against the regime, and you can see exactly which tasks it touches. Nearly twenty-three thousand of them.

Rule sets can also be built from other rule sets. This one combines the silver standard with the out-of-hours uplift. Because they're linked, not copied, a change to silver flows through everywhere it's used. The preview shows both at work, green tasks excluded, and the uplift applied at Blue Building one.

Now let's build a tougher one. Our bronze budget this year, the money covers red tasks, and green and amber work is deferred. Rules can test the task, its schedule, the building it's in, or anything in your asset register, and you can combine as many conditions as you need. This one is simple. If a task is green or amber, exclude it.

Other actions adjust a task's cost, its time, or how often it's done. We record why. That justification travels with every change the rule makes, so there's a clear audit trail. You don't have to build every rule by hand. Describe what you want in plain English. Say our mechanical contractor has put their rates up by ten percent, and Optimiser’s AI writes the rule.

It shows you the rule before anything is applied. Generate it, check it, apply it. Before we use it, we preview the impact. Of almost fifty-eight thousand tasks, about twenty-six thousand stay in, thirty-one thousand are deferred, and nine hundred and forty-five mechanical tasks pick up the uplift. Rules can also use your asset register, which lets a building owner plan around asset life.

Take the assets you've already decided to replace. If an asset's condition is C, meaning it needs major repair or replacement, and the task isn't a legal requirement, exclude it. There's no point in full planned maintenance on something that's about to be replaced. The preview shows just over a hundred tasks deferred, all on assets due for replacement, while every statutory task stays in.

Now we turn that rule set into a variant of our scenario. A variant is the same scenario with different rules or rates applied. We call it bronze, keep the same rates card, and apply the bronze budget rules. Optimiser costs it across the whole estate in a few seconds. Then we compare. Each column is a complete costing of the estate under that variant's rules.

Our baseline, the silver variant, and bronze side by side. Silver saves about eleven thousand pounds a year. Bronze takes the annual cost from three point two million down to one point seven million by deferring nearly thirty-one thousand tasks. We can compare trade by trade and building by building so you can see exactly where a saving lands.

Any variant can be opened up. Here's bronze. Cost by trade, by building, and by asset type, and the impact of each rule, how many tasks it excluded, and what that saved, right down to the individual tasks. So when someone asks what we're not doing to hit that number, the answer is right here. But deferring all amber work is a big step.

Often the better option is to keep the work but do it less often. So here's another rule set. Amber at half frequency. The rule picks out the amber tasks, and instead of excluding them, applies a frequency modifier of a half. Each amber task runs half as often as SFG20 recommends, and red statutory work is left exactly as it is.

We add it as a variant and compare it with the baseline and bronze. Amber at half frequency comes in at just under two and a half million pounds a year, over seven hundred thousand less than the baseline, and every task and every asset is still covered, just on a longer cycle. That's how you fit maintenance to a cost envelope.

Test the options side by side, keep the red statutory work that protects compliance, and when you've made the call, set that variant as the scenario's default. Everything exports to Excel, a single scenario or several variants side by side. Here's that export opened in Excel. The first sheet puts the variants side by side.

Grand total, trade costs, tasks costed, and annual hours. Three point two million for the baseline against one point seven for bronze. Every figure matches what you saw in Optimiser, so there's nothing to rekey and nothing to reconcile. Then each variant gets its own set of sheets, a summary and cost, and hours by trade and by building, and right down to every single task.

The schedule it comes from, the trade, the building, the asset, and its classification with the hours and the annual cost of each one. It's a normal spreadsheet, so you can filter, sort, and pivot it and share it with finance, procurement, or your contractors, so everyone works from the same numbers. Once you've chosen a variant, you can promote it straight back into a maintenance regime.

This is where the planning becomes the plan, either as a brand-new draft regime or as an update to the existing regime's draft. We'll create a new one. Optimiser applies every rule to the schedules as tailoring in the background. Tailoring is how SFG20 records a change to a schedule, so the regime always stays traceable back to the standard.

The live regime isn't touched. Here's the result, a draft regime named after the variant it came from, ready to review and publish through the same approval as any other change. Every task the variant removed is tailored out with the justification from its rule. That's your audit trail. Every change can be traced back to the rule and the reason behind it.

So the maintenance your budget pays for is defined and ready to drive your CAFM. So from the regime you already have, you get a costed plan, options to test, and a way to put the one you choose into practice. Once licenced, there's no limit on how much you use Optimiser, and every purchase includes a workshop-based training session using your own data. Back to you, Michael.

Michael: Thanks, Ben. Every time I see SFG20 Optimiser, I see another application for it. It's so powerful. So to bring it all together, Facilities-iQ contains the SFG20 standard in the form of an accessible, searchable library of maintenance schedules. SFG20 Mobiliser aligns the standard to your asset context, cutting the process of identifying the correct maintenance for your assets from days or weeks to hours.

From this, you can build and tailor maintenance regimes which reflect your sites. SFG20 Optimiser then overlays this by telling you the cost to deliver the regime, whether that work will be delivered in-house, subcontracted, or a blended model. The final result is an informed, auditable, and defensible position, all hosted in one secure SaaS platform.

Together, this allows building owners and occupiers to create evidence-based budgets, model different maintenance approaches, and establish cost benchmarks before decisions reach budgets, contracts, or downstream FM systems. You can use clearer cost information to support business cases, procurement, and board-level budget discussions.

Every site's unique, with its own requirements and challenges. If you would like to learn more about SFG20 or would like a demo of Facilities-iQ, Mobiliser, or Optimiser, where you can have more of a tailored discussion with us, simply choose your options in the poll. Again, you can choose more than one option here.

We're now going to dedicate some time to answer some questions that have come through. Don't worry if we aren't able to answer your question today, we'll respond to your query via the email you provided when you registered for this webinar. So first question that's come through, what are the advantages of using Optimiser over my current spreadsheets? Ben, do you wanna pick this one up?

Ben: Yeah. Okay. Um, so yeah, there are a number of reasons why we've developed SFG20 Optimiser as an integral part of our Facilities-iQ solution. It can be very easy for spreadsheets to become disconnected from, you know, the most recent information in your business. Where F- whereas SFG20 Optimiser is fully connected and up to date with our SFG20 definitions and, but therefore the information inside your business, like your rate cards or your actual regime.

People use different spreadsheet files in different ways, which can result in inconsistencies. You know, one source of truth is really important, and obviously SFG20 Optimiser ensures that it's a scalable consistency of approach. Spreadsheets often prove difficult to pinpoint, whereas SFG20 Optimiser delivers a full audit trail that can be seamlessly operationalised upon contract award. Well, I can see another good question.

Um, are there any restrictions on my use of SFG20 Optimiser? That sounds like one for you. Um, okay. Nice easy answer. No, there's not. Um, so there is no limit on the number of skill mappings, rate cards, scenarios, rule sets or variants that you can set up. The true value of SFG20 Optimiser is that you test different scenarios until you land on the right answer.

We don't want to limit this with restrictions, so you can use it as much as you want. Okay, next question. Um, here we've got one. Can I use SFG20 Optimiser to check if my outsourcing of maintenance is cost effective? Ben, do you wanna pick that up? Yeah, definitely. Um, SFG20 Optimiser allows you to define exactly what maintenance you require of your suppliers, and therefore the projected cost of this being delivered.

It can set a benchmark for you to compare your bids you receive so you can ensure, firstly, that the level of maintenance is aligned with your requirements, and secondly, that you're being charged a fair price. Okay. Let's see if we've got another good question. Um, yeah, here we go. So can I use SFG20 Optimiser to look at both my in-house costs and outsource costs? Michael?

Michael: Um, yeah, absolutely. So I guess the sophistication of SFG20 Optimiser is such that you can isolate different maintenance elements and apply projected or actual outsource cost or your own in-house cost of delivery, or a combination of the two. You can then run comparisons to determine if insourcing or outsourcing or a blend delivers the best results for you.

Awesome. Okay. Thank you everybody for your questions. Um, as referenced before, if we haven't got to everybody, then we will certainly respond to you, um, after this. Um, if you'd like to learn more, we've got a fantastic free downloadable brochure available which summarises the offerings of SFG20 Optimiser.

If you're interested in downloading this resource, simply let us know in the poll.

So on behalf of Ben and myself, thank you for taking the time to attend our webinar today. I hope you're as excited by the potential of SFG20 Optimiser as we are, and we look forward to being able to showcase the solution in the context of your specific circumstances and ambitions sometime soon. Bye, everybody.