2023 – A Year for Human-Centric Maintenance?

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06 January 2023

Felipe Ávila da Costa, Co-Founder & CEO at Infraspeak, shares his reflections on the past year and his predictions for human-centric maintenance in 2023.

Infraspeak is a global tech company that is transforming the world of FM through data, intelligence, and automation. Felipe is also a Co-Founder of Founders Founders, a community-driven scale-up incubator. Previously, Felipe was responsible for the Technological Center and the Startup Acceleration Program of UPTEC (University of Porto Science and Technology Park), where he supported the start, early development, and growth of more than 250 startups and innovation centres. Deeply involved in the Portuguese entrepreneurial ecosystem and featured as one of the "40 business leaders of the Future" by FAE, Felipe is an experienced mentor and speaker.

Picture: a photograph of Felipe. Image Credit: Infraspeak

Maintenance 5.0 in 2023 – Making Technology Work for Us

The turn of the year is always an important moment to reflect and take stock of your achievements. I keep returning to the same conclusions — in the same way that shaping FM and Maintenance have been crucial, permanent fixtures on Infraspeak’s mission, so too is it true that this is an important time for recalibration. 

We now operate in a post-COVID world where technology has penetrated all areas of our life. The term “digital transformation” is slowly becoming more and more mainstream. The pandemic shook the foundations of so many sectors, facility management included. 

We have now more respect for the urgency required to sustainably manage our buildings in the era of Maintenance 5.0, especially with raising stakes of finding and integrating sustainability into our operations. Technicians, teams, facility managers and service providers are and must be at the centre of operations, and must be the main beneficiaries of new and more sophisticated intelligent technologies.

"We need to find ways to make technology work for us. People and machines working together to integrate workflows, cut waste, improve logistics and create personalised solutions — this is a time for human-centric Maintenance, where people, software and hardware seamlessly interact and everything happens fluently in our time." 

To put it simply, Maintenance 5.0 is the result of data, people and technological intelligence coming together to create more sustainable operations, and ultimately, planets! It doesn’t make sense to bend over backwards in an attempt to fit technology into our operation. 

We need to find ways to make technology work for us. People and machines working together to integrate workflows, cut waste, improve logistics and create personalised solutions — this is a time for human-centric Maintenance, where people, software and hardware seamlessly interact and everything happens fluently in our time. 

Customisation, user experience, sustainability and resilience are all factors which drive facility management and Maintenance more and more, but ripping up roots and transforming working habits brings challenges too. There remain questions surrounding privacy and security, the need to upskill and reskill teams, new compliance frameworks and others. 

Collaboration Between FMs and Service Providers

In the coming years, we will no doubt cover these challenges again and again, sharing ideas and experiences with our fellow professionals. This will be strange at first, moving towards making changes that bring people to the centre of an industry not designed for people, but this discussion must happen and must happen collaboratively. 

At Infraspeak, we firmly believe that the present (and future) of facility management relies on the success of our ability to collaborate. It will be our ability to collaborate dynamically and with agility that will allow us to overcome the key challenges of our team/s, dismantling operational obstacles in the process and aligning communication channels between facility managers and service providers to remove friction.

By collaborating, we have the best chance at overcoming the challenges brought by Maintenance 5.0, and that’s why we have so much to gain collectively by having this conversation.

Individual and collective success is always achieved within a network. 

Picture: a graphic showing two blue gearwheels. Image Credit: Pixabay

Article written by Felipe Ávila da Costa | Published 06 January 2023

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