Asset & Facility Management in the carbon footprint of organizations

Over the last few years, we have had the opportunity to witness exponential growth in the current organizational ecosystem and the financial sector, more specifically, has been in the spotlight. Banks and financial institutions, which have posted positive annual results, are looking inward and trying to understand how they can implement strategies that allow them to save time and money on the one hand, and reduce their carbon footprint on the other, making their environmental management more effective. It is in this sense that the concept of Asset & Facility Management - or physical asset management - emerges. In simplified terms, it consists of managing and monitoring a company's assets - namely buildings, machinery, equipment - providing the best possible return for stakeholders.

We have therefore identified 5 steps that explain the importance of physical asset management in the carbon footprint of financial organizations:

Registration and inventory

Physical asset management allows each organization to keep a permanent record of all its assets on a single platform, as well as managing the useful life cycle of each physical asset. All the mandatory and legal documentation that a given building must present is thus brought together on a single platform. To give a concrete example, if the building's certificate expires within 3 months, the final technician receives an alert to start the renewal process.

On the other hand, through the mobility module - the app - Asset & Facility Management technology can easily and quickly inventory your assets, whether they are geographically dispersed or gathered in the same facility. In this sense, the solution takes advantage of the latest technologies such as NFC or geo-referencing to guarantee complete traceability of an organization's physical assets throughout their life cycle. Both in terms of cost control and the operational aspect of the availability and operation of each piece of equipment.

Technology

Migrating this data to an Asset & Facility Management technology platform will allow an organization to have a detailed schema of physical assets that is permanently up to date.

The adoption of Asset & Facility Management technology makes it possible to structure all assets in an organized manner by physical asset family.

Integrated Asset Management, Maintenance and Facility Services (Hard & Soft Services) based on a workflow of activities that ensures the automatic notification of the various players whenever their action is required, or just from an informational perspective so that all tasks related to the operation are known to the various levels of the internal structure, as well as the main service providers.

In addition, the platform can have an audit module, which guarantees the registration of quality, environmental, compliance audits, etc. (EX: audits of cleaning, maintenance, security or other providers, audits of compliance with certification requirements, audits of compliance with legal requirements, etc.)

This adaptability and automation of the platform, whose main objective is to streamline the entire process through the management of SLAs, will mean that these processes do not require human intervention and that the machines/sensors communicate directly to the final technician, eliminating more bureaucratic issues that are a waste of time and money for organizations.

Sensors

Nowadays, from an EMS - environmental management system - perspective, it is essential that an automated Asset & Facility Management platform has the ability to provide evidence of water consumption, light, waste, air quality, temperature, etc., making it possible to reduce the carbon footprint of a given organization. However, in order for this information to be collected, it is imperative that sensors are installed in organizations' buildings, continuing the idea that these same machines "respond" directly to the platform.

Analytics

This whole process will naturally generate data, automatically processed in the analytics module, based on algorithms, allowing investment decisions to be made based on facts.

Sustainability - Environmental Management System

With the EU's disclosure obligation and Taxonomy Regulation coming into force as part of the so-called "European Green Deal" in 2021, the European Union is increasingly demanding that sustainability be visible in the organizational ecosystem.

In this sense, the combination of the four steps mentioned above allows an Asset & Facility Management platform to have the complete value chain and focus on sustainability projects, giving the organization the possibility, at the end of each period, to develop a sustainability report focused on the environmental management system area.

The environmental management system, in turn, makes it possible to identify an organization's carbon footprint in an automated way - without having to fill in this mandatory report manually - and to understand in a clearer and more detailed way how to reduce the levels of this carbon footprint. By integrating these 5 steps, you can have visibility of the entire operation every second, acting immediately. The EMS is automatically fed by the value chain, and is not just a dashboard.

Given this context, it is possible to understand that a physical asset management platform is fundamental to the future of sustainability - ESG in the financial sector, making it possible to manage and monitor companies' assets and control the levels associated with their carbon footprint. The business paradigm is changing by leaps and bounds and organizations are increasingly concerned about responsible investment. In the near future, the decisions of organizational leaders in the financial sector will always take into account concepts such as: Sustainability and Environmental Management Systems!

Source: Green Savers