FM Innovations are one of Australia’s leading facility management software companies. Our private cloud solution helped FMI expand their offerings to new markets, provide better services to their existing markets and lower costs. We looked at the company’s commercial and technological challenges and worked together to find innovative and enduring solutions.
FMI was established in 1997 and have since become a leading Australian facility management software company, delivering solutions in Property and Facility Management through their flagship software packages WSMenterprise and WSMindustrial. These are sophisticated, yet easy-to-use preventative maintenance software solutions that make the increasingly complex FM industry more manageable.
FMI work with large corporates and State Government agencies nationally.
The Challenges
FMI identified growth opportunities for developing software for new markets. They also saw opportunities for making their flagship software packages more accessible to their existing target market of corporates, educational institutions and government bodies.
The problem was that most of their market didn’t have the cost-effective, scalable and elastic infrastructure necessary to support their new software; so they were unable to really penetrate new markets in new ways. Or as Kristiana Greenwood, Director of FMI said: “We always sold to the big end of town”.
The Challenge in Existing Markets
When evaluating FM software like FMI‟s, corporations tended to characterise it as non-core software. So they were reluctant to implement and host this within their existing hosting environment; in fact they wished to segregate their IT team completely from the support of the FM software.
FMI’s customer IAG was a prime example of a large company finding it difficult to get non-core software hosted in their corporate data centre. As far as IAG were concerned, they wanted the FMI software but they wanted FMI to host it.
The Challenge In New Markets
By making their software modular, FMI had the potential to open up new markets – smaller clients could choose only the modules they needed rather than taking the entire software suite in a one-size-fits-all arrangement.
FMI had seen that within the facilities management sector in general, there was a large unaddressed market where sophisticated software solutions were either not available or not economic to implement. This was particularly the case with the management of tier 2 and lower assets.
FMI licensed software is technically capable of providing these services but was not structured commercially for these non-tier-one markets.
The challenge was how to open those doors.
Commercial Challenges
- The existing software hosting solution had a complex and confusing pricing structure
- It had significant upfront costs
- It was priced beyond the SMB market, which was more price-sensitive than the large corporate market.
To satisfy the SMB market it needed to be based on a monthly recurring fee rather than a fixed upfront cost and it required a commercial solution with pricing that was scaled with the number of users.
“We were uncertain of the price and it had too many elements. The lower end cannot afford software services and maintenance.”
Kristiana Greenwood, Director