The buttonboard is extremely versatile for facility management.

Facts & Figures

September 2020

Company Facts:

Company: Post Real Estate Management and Services Ltd

Industry: Services

Number of employees: > 1,500

Project Facts:

Process optimisation with digitalisation

Increased service quality

Additional service models due to technology

A buttonboard in place of regular inspection rounds

Post Real Estate Management and Services Ltd manages a portfolio of around 2,000 properties across Switzerland. As part of its innovative process, it piloted the Service on Demand solution for the first time in 2017. Buttonboards are attached to selected hotspots such as coffee machines, snack vending machines, water dispensers, printers or toilet facilities, with which malfunctions or service requirements are reported at the touch of a button. Facility Management is assigned the job via the Service on Demand Platform. Regular inspections are a thing of the past. Swiss Post now also offers its solutions to third parties and in external markets. This has proved very popular and has enabled the company to build a large customer base. The buttonboard was developed by a partner firm in collaboration with the Swiss Post. The data is transmitted over the Swisscom LPN, LoRaWAN.

Challenge

In facility management, regular inspection rounds are extremely costly. Post Real Estate Management and Services Ltd identified a much more cost-effective system, as Corinne Blatter, Service-on-Demand product manager, explains: “We wanted to replace fixed inspection rounds with a needs-based system. Building users themselves can report when the coffee machine is playing up or the toilet paper has run out, for example.” The economical and intelligent Service-on-Demand solution was developed in cooperation with the Post Office’s IoT competence centre. Swisscom was invited on board as connectivity partner because: “We want to work with partners who are the best in their discipline.”

Solution

The undoubted ‘star’ of the new Service-on-Demand solution is the buttonboard. Each of the six buttons sends a specific service message to the task management platform. Users can simply press a button to report that a light needs fixing, for example. The messages are sent to the platform via the Swisscom Low Power Network (LPN), LoRaWAN, which offers a number of benefits: the Service-on-Demand solution does not need to be integrated into a company network at great cost, but works on a simple plug-and-play basis. What does it all mean for facility management? “It cuts our work time by up to 30%,” says Corinne Blatter.