OUTCO CEO, Jason Petsch, shares his thoughts in the January 2025 edition of BFM Magazine on how technology is transforming the future of outdoor FM. From real-time tracking and automated workflows to customer-centric portals, the possibilities continue to grow.

What will the future of outdoor FM look like? Maybe it’s already here.

Progress is hard to spot happening. We don’t suddenly wake up to self-driving cars, flying robots, or hand held computers that can do virtually anything. Instead, advances like this seep into our lives until we barely notice them, but also can’t imagine living without them.

Ultimately, progress isn’t just about new technology, but the way innovations change us. Just look at mobile phones. Beyond connectivity and communication, mobile technology has changed our expectations, rewiring our brains with dopamine hits from games and social media, but also teaching us to expect even the most ordinary experience to be faster and more convenient. Where will your next meal come from? Ordered online from Tesco or tracked in real time to your door by Deliveroo?

This is what the future looks like. Through clicks, swipes or taps, our expectations as consumers of what good service looks like have been transformed. And while it seems a long way from the world of facilities management, this shift in expectations has already happened to our customers and stakeholders. Once people understand that things can be ordered online or via mobile with transparent pricing or real time tracking or the ability to feed back, they start to seek the same convenience elsewhere, whether in their personal lives or at work. People accustomed to using Amazon were already mentally prepared for Uber or Airbnb. Think of an industry yet unchanged and you can be sure that the tech disruptors are already circling. These consumer examples demonstrate that transformations are about both the innovation and technology and the readiness to embrace its possibilities. I would argue that in the world of outdoor FM the first part-the technology-is already in place.

Our own experience as a company is a good case study of how quickly new technologies become normalised. OUTCO is an outdoor facilities management provider that started life as GRITIT, a Winter Gritting and Snow Clearance expert. In this sector, where slips and falls on ice can create real legal peril for organisations, the need to track, monitor and record service delivery in real time drove us to embrace technology from our company’s foundation. This meant providing on-site teams with effective mobile technology-our bespoke app-that could be used to direct and record activity and provide real-time updates and proof of service. To work, all this had to be connected to a powerful and reliable back-end IT platform. Especially in winter gritting–success involves working within a tight delivery window, often six hours or less, to execute thousands of jobs across the country. These must be delivered to individual specifications, in an ever-changing environment, often up against the elements and in the worst of the winter weather.

To achieve this, we use an integrated technology stack called Nimbus that brings together tracking and telematics software, with an algorithmic decision-making platform fed by the latest weather information. This ensures our teams are at the right place at the right time, delivering the right service. Having this data also changes the customer experience too. We created a customer app and portal that places live service information from the field in the palm of our client’s hands and the ability to communicate directly with our teams almost as an extension of their own business. This time-saving tool helps make our clients’ lives easier by giving them control, keeping them fully abreast of service delivery, and freeing up time to focus on other duties.

While our proprietary technology was built in-house to respond to the extreme demands of winter maintenance, customers have embraced the same level of convenience in all other aspects of our outdoor FM services. Jobs tracked from start to finish, ensuring we service the right sites, giving managers the ability to see the location of our operators on a map confirmed by our telematics and GPS software. We can also offer performance monitoring against SLAs and KPI requirements via the app or web portal. Once the information is in our database, it’s just a matter of making this accessible in a way that’s useful to our customers. This might seem dry but, for busy managers, the ability to get a real time view of works across their portfolio at any point in time adds real value.

Yet we already know that as soon as things become possible, they rapidly move from being remarkable to being just the way things are. If Winter Gritting can be this easy to arrange and manage, why not other services like tree works, fencing or car park and pothole repairs? Already customers are asking, “if I can do this via a contractor’s app or portal, can’t we side-step even more admin and integrate this via an API so we can do it from our own software?” The good news is that this type of deeper integration is possible, and already in place for some of OUTCO’s clients. And this is where things are getting really exciting.

Jason Petsch says that ‘It’s not just about the technology but the way people embrace possibilities’.

What would the equivalent to an Uber or Deliveroo look like in the world of Facilities and Property Management? Let’s imagine an operator visiting a site to trim hedges, notices a broken kerb that could be a potential hazard. They can geo-tag and log the issue there and then via the app, which automatically triggers a quotation for repairs. This gets sent to the client via an email who can immediately see the issue-look at any submitted photos-and decide whether to authorise the repair.

Swipe to fix? OK, it might not reach Uber-levels of convenience, but think this type of model of service delivery is now arriving in our industry. All the technical building blocks are already in place and we’ve seen that customers are keen to adopt new models of working. Moreover, there’s a strong financial incentive driving change: whether it’s fixing potholes, tree surveys or an emergency fence repair, many smaller works in the outdoor estate can consume an inordinate amount of admin time in securing quotations and managing delivery. Hence, we think the embrace of greater efficiency, integration and automation will happen rapidly. Incase you missed it, the future has already started.

For more information on how OUTCO can support your organisation this winter, contact us on 0800 0432 911 or email us using enquiries@outco.co.uk

Read the article in BFM Magazine HERE