Empact
Planon’s Accelerator opened window of opportunity for Empact
The South African market for in-sourcing services by sub-contractors underwent a substantial change with large corporations and companies increasingly shedding smaller single service providers in favour of multi-disciplinary service providers. The Empact Group saw the potential of this window of opportunity for growth. But they needed a tool to open that window.
Summary
By adopting Planon’s Accelerator Integrated Facility Management System, the Empact Group transformed its service delivery. Implemented ahead of schedule, the system improved efficiency, scalability, and transparency, integrating small contractors seamlessly and providing clients with constant updating about progress with the work orders. By 2024, Empact expanded its customer base, managing 157 buildings in 17 South African cities and towns, logging 94,615 maintenance orders. Real-time dashboards enhanced customer trust, streamlining operations and enabled growth in multiple markets.
Solutions
The Challenge
To position itself, Empact had to scale up the in-sourcing of a range of small sub-contractors in order to offer a diverse range of services to large companies. Services offered by Empact include facility management, the maintenance of critical components like generators, cold storage and transformers, office cleaning services, landscaping, security services, catering and hygiene services.
Empact Group customers wanted transparency and the ability to track agreed service levels and see the progress and planning of work.
They also needed a system that would integrate small businesses into its supply chain and delivery model, thus ensuring full insight into the performance of these small suppliers.
Our Solution
Offering this menu in 17 South African cities and towns through both internal resources and sub-contractors to clients in the mining, retail and manufacturing sectors, required a technical solution. After a thorough market evaluation, RfP process and demo sessions, Empact Group chose Planon for its Integrated Facility Management solution with Cohesive to implement and support it.
The Empact Group set an ambitious timeline of three months to implement an IFM that would enable it to deliver the results that its customers were expecting.
Instead of implementing the software from scratch, Cohesive took Planon’s best-practice suite ‘Accelerator’ as a starting point. As this aligned well with Empact’s requirements, quick wins and solutions started to flow. Empact’s Planon Accelerator went live in Week 10 (on 27 February 2020): two weeks ahead of the ambitious timeline.
The Client Benefits
Planon has enabled the Empact Group to better integrate its service offering, including a closed-loop digital connection with specialized partners in the regions. This allows it to scale projects at a higher pace, reduce costs for its customers, and enter new regions and markets successfully.
In March 2020 the Empact Group had 5 customers on Planon. End 2024, the customer base on Planon had grown to 9, involving 157 buildings and 4001 spaces. Empact utilises 3 998 employees and sub-contractors in providing its services.
In 2024 a total of 94 615 Facility Maintenance Orders were logged and executed.
By using Planon, Empact can showcase with live dashboards its performance to its customers on a real-time basis. Customers can easily track agreed service levels and see the progress and planning of work. This creates trust in the relationship, promotes transparency, enhances customer experience and saves a huge amount of time and effort compared to manual reporting.