Pre-Covid, facility managers and office admins were, by and large, focused on maintaining infrastructure to ensure the lowest downtime and impact on the bottom line. However, over the last couple of years, led by a growing focus on ESG, the new GOI office wellbeing labor code of 2019, and the impact of Covid, the sector is witnessing a tectonic change. Employee and environmental well-being has become a prime focus. At vrLocal we map this shift/evolution as a shift from Infrastructure Maintenance to Infrastructure Consciousness to Conscious Infrastructure.
Put simply Infrastructure Consciousness is the stage of acceptance of the impact infrastructure has on both the Environment and Employee well-being, apart from the traditional company bottom line, and then reorganizing and better maintaining this infrastructure to minimize any negative impact. This involves a combination of predictive maintenance, sustainability, and green initiatives.
Conscious Infrastructure is the next phase of evolution where organizations design their infrastructure from the ground up keeping this impact in mind, as well as deploy technology and infrastructure that are designed specifically to move an organization to zero negative infrastructure impact.
Predictive maintenance in the facilities management space is a mechanism pioneered and deployed by vrLocal in India, by which periodic detailed facility infrastructure audits are conducted and a dashboard indicating the live health of the infrastructure provided. This enables facility managers and admins alike to better plan their infrastructure maintenance, and reduce downtimes and bottom-line impact by having a clear understanding of what infrastructure pieces need urgent replacement/repair and what would be coming up for maintenance and when.