Measuring Success

Earth Day

April 22, 2020, 9:07 am

The Sustainabilist interviewed Gopalakrishnan, Operations Director at Emrill Services LLC, on how this integrated facilities management provider is leading sustainability operations

 

What distinguishes Emrill from other integrated facility management providers, and how do you communicate these advantages?
Through its Sustainability Leadership Plan, Emrill ensures sustainable practices are applied to all areas of the business and provides services that help clients work towards carbon neutrality and sustainability.

What sets Emrill apart is its commitment to creating value partnerships with its clients. Through innovation and digital transformation, Emrill delivers customer-oriented services sustainably.

When faced with challenges, Emrill collaborates with its customers to identify and execute long-term solutions, striving to simplify work and processes without compromising the outcome quality. To achieve this, Emrill encourages and promotes innovation at all levels of the business. One of Emrill’s core pillars is everyone should be treated with respect. This inclusivity has empowered and motivated Emrill’s employees to contribute to changes made within the company, positively impacting both Emrill and its customers.

Results are shared internally among Emrill employees and with customers, as transparency and openness are core values. Quarterly continuous improvement workshops, attended by customers, are held to discuss past successes and failures, with an emphasis on achieving further improvements. Annually, a review is held for every customer, allowing the Emrill team to share the year’s results, innovations and efficiencies and receiving customer feedback.

How has Emrill integrated the triple bottom line (people, planet, profit) framework into its operations?
In Emrill’s operations, there are many interconnected parts working together seamlessly to ensure customer satisfaction. Emrill knows a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between these parts is critical to making better business decisions. As part of its decision-making matrix, Emrill fully assesses the sustainability impact of each project or decision. This includes the equipment used on-site, partners for consumables and machinery utilised, which are evaluated on a continuous basis. Emrill has restructured its service delivery to ensure people, the planet and commercial success are considered factors. For example, it has implemented an efficiency enhancing app, moved away from paper-based work orders and centralised teams across locations, resulting in greater efficiencies and customer savings with a reduced impact on the environment.

The customers have embraced its approach to delivering services in a more sustainable and efficient way, and a number of clients in 2019 retained the company’s services based on its contribution to reducing the carbon footprint of its projects in the Emirates, which has invariably resulted in sustainable margins.

What are some of Emrill’s most innovative smart energy management solutions?
One of the fastest ROI-generating use cases of industrial Internet of Things is smart energy management and Emrill offers solutions promising significant cost savings.

Emrill monitors communities and buildings to optimise resource utilisation. By collecting and analysing real-time energy consumption data and constantly monitoring equipment to improve maintenance and prevent downtime, Emrill has delivered significant energy savings annually to its customers.
In addition, Emrill has also implemented an optimised asset performance initiative. Based on the existing portfolio and gathered data, Emrill has benchmarked asset efficiency in order to optimise the performance of similar assets.

By utilising remote monitoring, Emrill provides proactive responses. The FM provider has established a command and control centre in critical contracts to monitor system parameters 24/7. Any deviations trigger an emergency response team to take action, which has resulted in a faster response time to emergencies and a reduction in loss of utility.

How does Emrill measure its success and how have these achievements been corroborated?
All data captured by the systems has been benchmarked, and site teams are empowered to track their performance on an ongoing basis to capture any deviations so they can be rectified immediately. These results are compared to benchmarked norms and are also shared with Emrill’s customers to ensure transparency and stakeholder involvement.

Moreover, the carbon footprint of all projects and activities are monitored. Based on the data, Emrill frequently rolls out initiatives, such as new innovations, improved processes or modern equipment, striving to become carbon neutral.

Emrill’s service delivery and value partnerships have enabled the company to achieve 80% customer retention, which is evidence of Emrill’s success in working collaboratively with its customers and partners to contribute to energy management targets.

How is Emrill contributing to the development of the infrastructure of Dubai as a smart city?
Innovation is at the core of everything Emrill does, and its clients benefit from the latest technology and equipment, including but not limited to:

• Solar and battery-operated vehicles to reduce fuel consumed and the environmental impact of projects.
• An efficiency-enhancing app, specifically designed to enhance and refine the delivery of soft FM services in both horizontal and high-rise communities. Via the app, staff are assigned optimised routes and task schedules. As staff complete jobs, they upload photographs, which are assessed and cross-checked by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ensure they meet quality assurance standards and are then automatically synced to the supervisor’s interface.
• ‘Autocut’, an energy-saving project which automatically cuts off power once a cleaning machine’s battery is fully-charged to ensure energy efficiency.