Improving FM Maturity in Aged Care

Raising FM Maturity in Aged Care: From Reactive Chaos to Seamless, Cloud-Centric Planned Maintenance in Six Months

Key Metrics

• 4,000+ Assets Managed

• 160+ Monthly Work Orders

• 100+ Active Platform Users

Key Outcomes

• User adoption transformed: Hundreds of staff across the organisation - including those working with English as a second language - are now confidently using FMI Works to log requests, replacing a culture of phone calls and emails to the facilities team.

• "No log, no job" policy successfully embedded: A clear, organisation-wide expectation that all maintenance requests must be logged in the system has been established and maintained, bringing consistency and accountability to the request process.

• Facilities team time freed for strategic work: By eliminating the need to manually log requests submitted by phone or email, and reducing time spent chasing incomplete information, the team reclaimed the capacity to focus on higher-value activities.

• Planned maintenance launched within six months: Within half a year of going live with FMI Works, the team stood up a planned maintenance programme - something that had previously been out of reach while reactive maintenance consumed all available resources.

• FM maturity elevated across the organisation: The provider moved from using their FM platform purely as a reactive ticketing system to actively managing assets and planned maintenance - a significant step forward in operational capability.

About the Customer

Our customer is a prominent Australian aged care provider, recognised for their excellence and diversity of care across multiple retirement communities. With a strong reputation built over many years, the organisation has expanded considerably - and with that growth came a need to ensure their high standards of care and operational management could scale consistently across every site.

As a cloud-first, security-conscious organisation operating in culturally diverse regions of Australia, they required a facilities management solution that was both robust and genuinely accessible to a wide range of users.

The Challenge

The facilities team knew that getting their workforce to log maintenance requests directly into the platform - rather than calling or emailing - would unlock significant efficiencies. But achieving that shift proved harder than anticipated.  

Their existing FM software was unintuitive, creating barriers for a workforce whose expertise lay in delivering care, not navigating technology. With several staff working with English as a second language, those barriers were even higher.

The result was predictable: most staff bypassed the system entirely, defaulting to phone and email.  

Every request that arrived outside the platform had to be manually logged by the facilities team, consuming time and energy that should have been directed toward improving operations. Reactive maintenance dominated the team's workload, leaving no capacity to develop proactive programmes or advance the maturity of how the organisation managed its growing asset base.

The Solution

Having worked with the FMI team previously, this customer was quick to shortlist FMI Works when searching for a more intuitive platform. After signing on to migrate in late 2021, they engaged closely with FMI's consultants to map out where they were starting from - and what success would look like.  

User adoption was identified as the primary goal from the outset, and the FMI team responded with a tailored onboarding approach that included targeted training for core users and a library of accessible online help videos and articles.

The onboarding was designed to build genuine confidence, not just technical familiarity. Within a couple of weeks, the team was set up to receive and action work orders. The provider also had stringent cloud security requirements - including specific considerations around login procedures and hosting - which FMI Works accommodated without compromise.  

The combination of an intuitive interface and strong implementation support laid the foundation for a meaningful and lasting change in how the organisation managed its facilities.

"We knew that user adoption was an important goal for the client, and so we engaged with a range of users to put together a package of training and online videos to support their adoption of FMI Works."
- Customer Success Manager, FMI Works

The Impact

From phone calls to platform-first

The shift in user behaviour has been substantial. Hundreds of staff across the organisation are now logging requests directly in FMI Works - a complete reversal of the pre-migration pattern. Templated requests mean that when jobs arrive, they arrive complete: the facilities team has the information they need to act immediately, without the time-consuming back-and-forth that previously slowed everything down.  

A quick glance at the dashboard now gives the team a real-time view of all open jobs, filterable by building or site, with information presented visually so it's accessible to every user regardless of technical confidence.

Capacity to do more

The cumulative time saved - from eliminated manual logging, reduced follow-ups, and streamlined triage - has had a compounding effect on what the team can achieve.  

Within six months of going live, the facilities team had developed and launched a planned maintenance programme. Previously, that wasn't a viable ambition: reactive demand was all-consuming. Now, with a reliable, self-sustaining request process in place, the team has the headspace and the data to think strategically - supporting the organisation's continued expansion and delivering a more consistent experience for residents across all communities.