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

Introduction and Welcome

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

Ben: Hi, everyone. I'm Ben. Um, I head up the product engineering function here at SFG20.

Michael: Thanks, Ben. Uh, between us, we're going to 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, um, and increasingly globally.

SFG20 Optimiser is our brand-new enhancement that is going to change the way in which FM service providers, contractors, and consultants bid for work and manage ongoing contracts. Just to let you know before we begin, we like to encourage all of our participants to interact in our webinars. You can do this by taking part in 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 in 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 we aren't able to get to your question today, don't worry, we'll respond to your query via the email you provided when you registered for this webinar.

So let's get started 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 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 our SaaS solution called Facilities-iQ. Facilities-iQ doesn't just host the standard, it turns it into an integral part of an organization's operational delivery.

Inside Facilities-iQ, you'll find an extensive library of over 1,500 expertly authored building maintenance schedules, which can be used to maintain all assets within a multitude of building types. Where appropriate, you can tailor the standard to your client's specific asset context, construct maintenance regimes that define the maintenance required to support their buildings, and integrate these into 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, however, it couldn't tell you what that maintenance would cost to deliver. So SFG20 Optimiser is our brand-new enhancement to Facilities-iQ that is going to change the way that FM service providers, contractors, and consultants bid for work and manage ongoing contracts. SFG20 Optimiser combines the SFG20 maintenance standard with your client's individual assets to deliver accurate maintenance pricing.

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 contract or operational change.

SFG20 Optimiser's rules engine lets you define how you want to deliver the maintenance and apply that approach consistently across every cost model We've heard from FM service providers and contractors that they often experience these types of challenges. Firstly, there's bidding for new contracts.

Whether it's complicated Excel files, key person dependency, and estimator and assessor roles, a lack of consistency of approach from bid to bid, or processes that take far too long, there's an ambition to improve the bid preparation, and it's a common refrain that we hear from FM service providers.

There's also right-sizing estimates. Whether it's the inevitable adjustment required to an initial estimate to fit a set budget or target price, or revising the commercials following a true-up asset verification post-contract award, making changes to the initial bid sizing is a process that typically requires a disproportionate amount of time.

And finally, there's handling change. Whether this comes from the SFG20 standard changing to reflect legislative updates or a customer demanding a more cost-effective deliverable midterm or on contract renewal, understanding the impact of change can often be onerous and carries commercial risk if the impact is not fully and accurately understood.

In short, the requirement is for a more effective bid process and assessment of the impact of making change. Before we move on, we'd love to hear from you. Let's bring up our first poll. So which of the following is your biggest asset information challenge? We'll give you a few moments to submit your responses, and remember, you can choose more than one option in all of our polls.

So SFG20 Optimiser addresses those challenges that we just talked about head on. It enables you to undertake bid production dramatically faster and with greater assurance, build a standardised, repeatable, and scalable estimating model, and undertake rapid recalculation when assets or the SFG20 standard changes.

We're now going to 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 service provider, that's your own engineers and the specialist subcontractors you bring in. 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 service provider, the rates are what you charge, your own engineers' rates, and your subcontractors' prices with your margin on top, 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, clients, or pricing strategies.

It's a good way to test a bid. A standard card and a keener one, 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 service provider, that's the full cost of maintaining the estate to the SFG20 standard before you shape the bid.

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 an out-of-hours uplift. Blue Building One is occupied around the clock, so your engineers work there out of hours. One rule, every task at Blue Building One is priced fifteen percent higher, 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, so there are no surprises when it comes to pricing the work.

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 to every bit that uses it. The preview shows both at work, green tasks excluded, and the uplift applied at Blue Building One.

Now let's build the rule set for a tender. The client's specification tells us which assets are out of scope, and we want our price to match it exactly. We call it tender scope. Rules can test the task, its schedule, the building it's in, or anything in the client's asset register. Here, the tender leaves out assets in condition C, the ones that need major repair or replacement, because that work will be quoted separately.

So if an asset's condition is C, its tasks are excluded. And we record why. That justification travels with every change the rule makes, so the client can see exactly how the scope was set. You don't have to build every rule by hand. Describe what you want in plain English, say, our mechanical fitters cost ten percent more on this contract, and Optimise's AI writes the rule.

It shows you the rule before anything is applied. Generate it, check it, apply it. Then we preview the impact. Of almost fifty-eight thousand tasks, nearly fifty-two thousand stay in, a hundred and twenty are out of scope, and nearly five thousand eight hundred pick up the mechanical uplift. 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 tender compliant, keep the same rate card and apply the tender scope rules. Optimiser costs it across the whole estate in a few seconds. Then we compare. Each column is a complete costing of the estate, our baseline, the silver variant, and the tender side by side.

That's the price we put in front of the client and exactly how it differs from the full SFG20 regime. We can compare trade by trade and building by building, so you can see where the cost sits and where your margin comes from. Any variant can be opened up. Here's the tender cost by trade, by building, and by asset type, and the impact of each rule, how many tasks it excluded and what it added, right down into the individual tasks.

So when the client asks, "What's in the price and what isn't?" The answer is right here. That's how you price a tender with confidence. Every task accounted for, every assumption written down. When you've settled on the bid, set that variant as the scenario's default. Everything exports to Excel. A single scenario or several variants side by side ready to go into your bid pack.

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. Every figure matches what you saw in Optimiser, so there's nothing to re-key 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 your estimators can filter, sort, and pivot it and build it straight into the tender return. When the contract is won, you can promote the variant straight into a maintenance regime. This is where the bid becomes the plan, either as a brand-new draft regime or as an update to an existing 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. 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 tender excluded is tailored out with a justification from its rule, so the work you deliver is exactly the work you priced, and it's ready to drive your CAFM and your engineer's schedules. So from the client's regime, you get a costed bid, options to test, and a way to deliver exactly what you priced.

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: Thank you, 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 the asset context of your bid or contract, cutting the process of identifying the correct maintenance for assets from days or weeks to hours. From this, you can build and tailor maintenance regimes which reflect your client's sites. Then SFG20 Optimiser overlays this with the price to win your bid, enabling you to test different scenarios before landing on the maintenance profile and pricing of your definition.

This is all hosted in one secure SaaS solution. Together, this enables service providers and contractors to build cost models for tenders, renewals, and mobilisation, apply commercial and operational expertise consistently, increase bid throughput, forecast labour requirements, and produce more accurate, defensible pricing.

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

We're now gonna dedicate some time to answer some questions that have come through. Don't worry if we're not able to answer your question today, we'll respond to your query via the email you provided when you registered for the webinar. So first question I can see 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, sure. Um, so there are a number of reasons why, um, when it comes to spreadsheets and Optimiser that we've made Optimiser an integral part of the Facilities-iQ solution. It can be very easy for your spreadsheets to become disconnected from the most recent information, whereas obviously SFG20 Optimiser is fully connected and up to date, not only with our SFG20 definitions, but also changes in your business to maintenance regimes or rate cards or even your skill mapping.

People use different spreadsheets and different files in different ways. This can result in inconsistencies, whereas SFG20 Optimiser ensures a scalable consistency of that approach. The spreadsheets can often be difficult to pinpoint, whereas SFG20 Optimiser delivers a full audit trail that can be seamlessly operationalised upon contract award. Okay, let's find another question. Um, here's one. Are there any restrictions on my use of SFG20 Optimiser? Michael, that one sounds like it's for you.

Michael: Okay, great. Nice easy one. So no, um, there is no limit on the number of skill mappings, rate cards, scenarios, rule sets or variants that you can set up. The value of Optimiser is that you test different scenarios until you land on what you think is the right answer.

We don't want to limit this with restrictions, so you can use it as much as you want. Um, so let's find the next question. Um, can I use SFG20 Optimiser to set up different pricing models? Ben.

Ben: Yeah, you definitely can. Um, so you can create as many rate cards as you want, and these can reflect the very small nuances of your business.

When you set up scenario variants, you can then apply different rate cards to the same scenario to gauge the impact of these on the price that you charge or the price that somebody else charges. Right, next one. Uh, okay. How easy is it to change our models if new information comes to light? Michael? Okay.

Michael: So, uh, yeah, if I'm understanding this question correctly, there are different ways in which the goalposts can move. So firstly, the asset context could change. For example, a post-contract verification or true-up, um, simply push the updated register through SFG20 Mobiliser and subsequently through Optimiser, and you'll have instant visibility of the impact of that change, both in terms of effort and, and price.

Secondly, SFG20 definitions may change. So if so, you'll be notified by us that schedules in your scope have been updated and the impact of this, so you can then make an informed decision whether to adopt those changes or not. A further situation may be a, a, I guess, a customer coming to you to say they want to continue with your support, but they need to tighten their belts.

In this situation, SFG20 Optimiser is brilliant for testing different scenarios to see how you can make a price fit a budget without compromising, for example, on, on compliance. Okay. So, uh, that's all the time we've got for questions at the moment. If your question hasn't been answered, um, as referenced earlier, we'll make sure that we reply to you directly with an answer.

Um, if you'd like to learn more, we have 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 everyone.