Speech by MOS Tan Kiat How at the 5th Facilities Management Conference and BuildTech Asia Exhibition 2022

Tuesday, 15 March 2022

A very good morning to all of you. I am very happy to join you today at the 5th edition of the Facilities Management Conference.

I understand that we have about 10,000 physical and virtual attendees joining us for the conference, and the co-located BuildTech Asia Exhibition.

As the COVID-19 situation improves, we are able to have more physical events, and I am pleased to meet all of you here today in person.

Drivers of Transformation

This year’s conference focuses on smart and sustainable Facilities Management (FM).

This is an important and timely topic, as we work towards achieving our green buildings ambitions, and combat climate change.

Buildings contribute to more than 20% of Singapore’s carbon emissions. Much of this comes from the electricity consumed in the operations of building systems, such as air-conditioning and lighting.

At the same time, many of our buildings may not have been designed with sustainability and maintainability in mind. This increases the maintenance workload for our facilities managers, and the use of resources, such as water, to maintain the buildings.

In addition to sustainability, the FM industry will need to cope with an ageing workforce, as well as ageing infrastructure.
 
In Singapore, about 40% of our resident Professional, Managerial, Executive and Technical (PMET) workforce in the Built Environment (BE) sector are 50 years and older.

This means that we will need to leverage technology and redesign jobs, including in the FM industry, to create exciting and rewarding careers, and attract and retain the next generation of professionals.

In addition, more than 50% of our buildings will be above 30 years old by 2025.

As our buildings age, the costs associated with operations and maintenance are also expected to increase, including labour costs arising from manpower-intensive maintenance.

Transforming Facilities Management

To address these trends and drivers, we have worked closely with our BE industry stakeholders on several transformation efforts over the past few years.

For example, our efforts on the sustainability front are part of the Singapore Green Plan 2030, a whole-of-nation movement to advance Singapore’s national agenda on sustainable development.

We have launched the latest edition of the Singapore Green Building Masterplan as part of the Green Plan, and set ourselves three targets of “80-80-80 in 2030”, to push for a more sustainable and low-carbon built environment.

First, we aim to green 80% of our buildings by Gross Floor Area by 2030.

Second, we aim for 80% of new developments to be Super Low Energy (SLE) buildings from 2030. SLE buildings achieve energy savings of over 60% compared to 2005 baseline levels, when we first began our journey to green our buildings in Singapore.

Third, we aim to achieve 80% of improvements in energy efficiency, compared to 2005 levels, for our best-in-class buildings by 2030.

And the FM industry, all of you, play a very critical role in our sustainability efforts.

By designing our buildings right, leveraging technology, and aligning our incentives, we can utilise less resources to maintain and operate our buildings, and achieve greater sustainability for the long-term.

Let me first talk about designing our buildings right.

We are working with our stakeholders further upstream in the building lifecycle to incorporate considerations for building maintenance and operations upfront in building designs. This is what we call Design for Maintainability, or DfM.

For instance, designers could ensure that air-conditioner ledges are designed with adequate ventilation to avoid heat being recirculated into air-conditioning units. This would not only reduce the use of energy resources required to cool buildings, but also the maintenance frequency of the air-conditioning units.

BCA has put together Enhanced Guides for DfM, which provide project teams with an easy reference on how to incorporate DfM considerations upfront.

And we will continue to actively engage project teams to incorporate DfM in building designs. Last September, we launched the latest edition of Green Mark, a leading green building certification scheme that is tailored to tropical urban environments, very much like in Singapore.

Buildings that demonstrate exemplary standards of DfM will be awarded a Maintainability Badge, on top of their Green Mark certification. This provides recognition to developers who take the effort to ensure the sustainability of their buildings over their lifespan.

Second, leveraging technology.

We have worked with service buyers and service providers to adopt smart solutions to enhance the productivity of maintenance, or what we call Smart FM.

An example of a Smart FM solution is the installation of sensors around the building that can collect and monitor building performance data, allowing facilities managers to respond promptly to incidents. These sensors could also help maintenance teams reduce the use of resources in a sustainable manner, such as automatically switching off the lights when a room is not in use.

BCA has also put together a Guide to Smart FM for the industry’s use, which contains best practices for the adoption of Smart FM solutions.

We will continue to accelerate the adoption of Smart FM across the industry, through initiatives such as the Smart FM Challenge. The Challenge encourages building owners, FM firms and solution providers to work together to adopt Smart FM for their portfolio of buildings over the next three years.

So leveraging technology, and Smart FM is an important part of our strategy. But, not just designing right, and leveraging technology, importantly, we must also align our incentives to encourage the adoption of advanced technologies.

In particular, FM firms can harness efficiencies from managing different FM services on an integrated platform, and aggregating FM services across many buildings.

Some of our progressive firms have pioneered the use of these technologies.

For example, I visited a company that is called CBRE. CBRE is able to leverage its integrated Vantage Analytics platform to virtually manage its entire portfolio of buildings, for its full suite of FM services including security, cleaning, and energy management.

This is what we call Integrated FM (IFM) and Aggregated FM (AFM). We have found that IFM and AFM can create up to 20% in productivity improvements, cost savings, and reduce demand on resources such as electricity and water.

IFM and AFM can also greatly enhance the quality of building maintenance, allowing all building users to benefit from the enhanced responsiveness of maintenance teams to issues such as lift faults and cleaning incidents.

And the adoption of IFM and AFM will also create good jobs with higher wages for our locals, such as integrated FM managers and digital systems specialists. The Government will take the lead in driving the adoption of IFM and AFM.

Many of our government agencies, including JTC and HDB, have started adopting IFM and AFM for their buildings. But there are significant costs associated with retrofitting buildings for IFM and AFM.

Buildings may need to undertake extensive retrofitting to install smart infrastructure such as sensors and intelligent building management systems, for data to be fed to a centralised command centre to coordinate operations across buildings.

And service buyers and service providers will need to look into reworking their procurement and processes to facilitate IFM and AFM.

This is a significant effort that requires all parties to move beyond contracts for a single building based on headcounts, to outcome-based contracts across multiple buildings and FM disciplines. FM firms will need to upskill their workers to use digital tools and platforms, in order to realise the full benefits of IFM and AFM.

To kickstart the adoption of IFM and AFM in Singapore, we have introduced a $30 million grant which I announced last week. Across different building typologies, we plan to fund around 10 to 15 projects with 70% of the qualifying costs to adopt these advanced technologies. This will establish the business case for wider adoption.

In order to qualify for the grant, both service providers and service buyers will also need to rework their procurement and processes to integrate at least three FM services, for at least three buildings in their portfolio. BCA will launch the grant from the second half of this year for a period of 3 years, and we will share more details when ready.

I encourage all interested firms, both service buyers as well as service providers, to keep a look out, and apply for this grant. There are existing training programmes curated by BCA Academy and trade associations. I encourage everyone to allow your workers to attend these programmes, so that they can be trained in the use of smart FM solutions.

You can also refer to BCA’s Guide on FM Procurement for insights on how procurement and processes can be transformed for IFM and AFM.

Conclusion

I always share with colleagues that for a building with 60 years, 70 years in terms of lifespan, we spend a few years developing it, a few more years constructing and building it, but many decades operating and maintaining it. So the FM industry, plays such an important role in ensuring the long term sustainability of buildings in Singapore, and certainly for many cities around the world as well.

So I seek the strong support of our industry partners – developers, designers, building owners, FM firms and importantly, our workers – to continue to work closely with us to transform the FM industry.  This will be a critical part of our efforts to build a liveable and sustainable city for the future generation.

Events such as the Facilities Management Conference today, and the BuildTech Asia Exhibition provide us with a platform to explore various solutions and strategies in our transformation journeys.I encourage all of you, all participants check out the various seminars, panel discussions and exhibition booths over the next two days.

I wish all of you a fruitful conference and exhibition ahead. Importantly, stay safe and stay well, I look forward to meeting more of you physically in the coming years. Thank you.