The ravaging economic recession in Nigeria has, by default, tutored many organizations on how to be creative, innovative and also to realize the need to be cost-effective, to increase productivity and remain profitable. The implication of this is that, increasingly, organizations are concentrating on their core businesses while contracting out those aspects of the businesses they lack the requisite competence, expertise, and the required technology to handle efficiently and profitably, writes CHUKA UROKO.
Though relatively new, the facilities management (FM) industry in Nigeria is, increasingly, gaining traction with an outlook that speaks of an industry that is poised not only for growth and development, but also to add value and improve asset quality for individuals and institutions.
The reason for this is not far-fetched and could be gleaned from three main planks including rising professionalism among the operators, adoption of international best practices and, above all, the growing interest in assets management outsourcing, especially from corporate entities.
Additionally, the challenges posed by the ravaging economic recession in the country has schooled many organizations on creativity, innovativeness and prudence, and the lessons are such that the need to be cost effective, to increase productivity and remain profitable is redefining most business operations in different sectors of the economy.
The thinking among many organizations is that with their real estate assets, which constitute about 30 minimized and efficiency improved to better impact productivity and the bottom line.
Quite significantly, FM outsourcing has gained ground in sectors like oil & gas, retail, commercial and residential real estate. The telecoms and ICT sector is now witnessing an impressive growth and are also catching up with the trend. The financial services industry is also catching on and few of them including Standard Chartered Bank, FCMB, Access Bank, etc have latched on the benefits of the trend.
Largely a private sector concern, some public sector institutions notably federal universities have outsourced their facilities management to FM operators. The Lagos State government has gone a step higher and has, in its pace-setting tradition, set up a facilities management department as an agency of government responsible for the management of its large stock of facilities.
Some residential estates which used to handle their FM internally now outsource them to facilities management companies. An example is the 750 housing unit Golf Estate in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, where the developers have decided to outsource the management of the estate to an FM firm which will deal directly with the estate residents so they could concentrate on their construction business.
These are positive and encouraging developments because, before now, discussions on facilities management outsourcing centred around what happened outside Nigeria, but today, many businesses are catching on with the trend. What is happening, according to Tunde Obileye, CEO, Great Heights Limited, “is a product of growing consciousness among businesses that the only way to save, preserve and add value to their assets is simply to manage and maintain those assets well using professional facilities managers”.
Obileye recalls that before now, many organizations contracted various aspects of their FM piecemeal, pointing out that the trend presently is for organizations to consolidate their FM requirement into Total Facilities Management and it is becoming common to find tenders calling for total FM services.
Growing customer-base leading to increased assets portfolio has seen the telecoms sector in Nigeria also following this trend in order to cope with their facilities in various parts of Nigeria which explains the decision by MTN Nigeria and Ericsson to outsource their FM services to Alpha Mead Facilities in 2015. Currently, Alpha Mead Facilities Manages over 50 locations for MTN Nigeria across Lagos, West and Northern Nigeria; and manages major Erricson potfolio in Nigeria, Ghana and some African countries.
Recently, another leading global telecommunications and ICT company, Huawei, outsourced over 10 thousand square meters of its office space and more than 100 flats in its residential scheme to this leading light in facilities management and services in Nigeria.
The company is not particularly surprised with the opportunities that come its way because it prepared for them. “A well known business principle says you have to devise your strategy to move against traffic. This principle derives from the Blue Ocean strategy where we have looked at the general trend and direction of the environment and prepared ourselves for these challenges”, says Femi Akintunde, the company’s MD/CEO.
“We went back to the drawing board to reflect on how we can position ourselves in the midst of the challenges we don’t have control over; but we have control over how we respond to them. So, we analysed the market and took a view that waiting time is preparation time.
“Opportunity will meet you at the point where you keep yourself. You don’t work for opportunity, you create the opportunity. In the midst of all those difficult times, we decided to continue to invest in capacity. “Opportunity will meet you at the point where you keep yourself. You don’t work for opportunity, you create the opportunity. In the midst of all those difficult times, we decided to continue to invest in capacity. We were building capacity and shopping for talents round the year; we leverage technology and process automation to ensure standardization and repeatability of our best practices, we trained over 200 facility managers last year alone. All these have adequately prepared and enabled us to be able to handle the most complex and biggest FM projects being outsourced by the corporate multi-nationals”, he disclosed in an interview.
He also hinted on the next strategic move being planned by the company “ currently our focus is building capacity to be able to manage large scale public infrastructure maintenance projects like the airports, the stadia, government hospitals, government real estate assets etc. All these have suffered major degradation over the years due to deferred maintenance and as a result have contributed to significant drain in the finances of government due to under performance and over expenditure. Now, we are in a new era where the present government has demonstrated very good understanding on the critical importance of infrastructure provision and maintenance in driving the growth of the economy and improving the living standard of the people. By embracing the Public Private Partnership approach, performance standard will be higher and this will significantly reduce the menace of corruption which has being a key reason why many companies have decided to keep away from government project over the years. Through this approach, we believe there will be increased investment in infrastructure provision and the quality of service is expected to generally improve as a result. We therefore, believe that as a leading Facilities Management company in Nigeria, we must prepare adequately to be able to participate actively and demonstrate our readiness to support this government initiative.”
This, perhaps, explains why Alpha Mead is always the first and only consideration by these corporate organizations for their FM services. The company has also demonstrated strong passion for global best practice and professionalism and, to deepen this passion, it went into partnership with Cluttons LLP of UK which gave birth to what is today the AMFacilities-Cluttons Joint Venture firm, offering premium services in the Nigerian real estate space.
“Coming into Nigerian real estate market is a major step we have been considering for three years now; we see Nigeria as a major emerging market in terms of key drivers going forward. Alpha Mead is a reputable company; it is a successful business with a fantastic understanding of the market and is of good practice”, said Ian Gladwin, Clutton’s Head of International, at the partnership launch in Lagos.
The capacity Alpha Mead has built is such that no matter the level of asset sophistication and quality of FM services required by the multinationals – most of which have complex assets across multiple locations, it can easily mobilize and stabilize operations in multiple locations and this remains a huge strength largely unmatched in the industry.
Its processes, systems, people, technology and operational network have been designed to be implementable in different situations and report on key business metrics that multi-national organisations value strongly.
The company’s processes are not just documented, they have also been consistently vetted and approved by international quality organisations that the multinationals are used to. These give the multi-nationals a lot of confidence in the technical competence and operational capacity of Alpha Mead.
Again, the company’s ISO 9001:2008 certification has been continuously accredited by relevant international organisations for five uninterrupted years, and its operations have gone on for almost 10 years without any major fatality which speaks to how much attention it pays to the things that matter to it and its reputation.
As a growing trend, outsourcing has shown huge benefits for businesses in terms of cost-saving and profitability as assets are now well managed because of the availability of the required technologies by FM companies; frequent business operation breakdown is avoided while the life-cycle of business assets is now maximized.
Many organisations are beginning to realize the fact that they can now outsource a daunting task like FM and focus their limited resources on their core business, in the face of increasing sophistication of real estate assets across key sectors. The technologies, expertise and technical know-how required to manage these sophisticated facilities are too capital-intensive for non-FM companies to acquire.
