Service firm does ordinary work in extraordinary ways

Even before “outsourcing” became a buzzword in the Philippines, businessman-lawyer Edilberto Bravo of office machines provider U-Bix Corp. has already been very much into it through Facilities Managers Inc. or FMI.

FMI started some 15 years ago as a janitorial and housekeeping services provider with a few but highly skilled employees. From the very first day of its operations, FMI has made it a point to turn a simple cleaning task into an extraordinary service. With such a reputation, the company, only a year after opening shop, was already able to win the trust of some of the country’s biggest companies.

To date, FMI has grown into a P600-million company with a workforce of 4,000 and a clientele of 350 companies across all industries, including several multinational corporations operating in the country.

A licensee of ServiceMaster of the United States , FMI is now one of the biggest among the 2,000 facilities service providers in the Philippines, accounting for at least 20 percent of the market.

The services it offers, aside from janitorial and housekeeping, now include restoration of properties affected by disasters, grounds care and landscaping, facility operations and maintenance, and pest control.

Its major accounts include some of the country’s biggest manufacturing companies, embassies, schools, banks, engineering firms, hospitals, pharmaceutical firms and business process outsourcing companies (BPOs).

Its partnership with Service Master served as a seal of good housekeeping and the key that opened doors for FMI to some of the biggest MNCs operating in the Philippines, including Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, Texas Instruments, Ford Motors, Chevron, Hershey and Pfizer.

Service Master is a 64-year-old $7.3-billion US company that provides professional management services to 10.5 million customers in 41 countries.

It was later acquired by Aramark Corp., a US food services and uniform rental firm, which further expanded FMI’s core offerings and created an opportunity to cover bigger institutional accounts.

Workforce

Bravo attributed the firm’s growth to its workforce. “These are the men and women of FMI who—through their persistence, dedication and continuing quest for excellence—enabled the company to reach heights beyond our expectations,” says Bravo. “Our people are the soul of the company.”

Given the example set by Service Master, which Bravo says is the only company he knows that talks about the people’s dignity first before money, FMI puts much importance to its people, the dignity in their work, and continued improvement of their skills.

Bravo, with the support of FMI and other UBix subsidiaries, initiated the establishment of Facilities Management Academy, a technical-vocational school accredited by Tesda, in 2000 to ensure that each FMI employee is provided with sufficient training to make him/her as efficient, effective and productive as possible.

Workers are trained not only on skills but also on work values required of service personnel. The school was converted in 2008 into a college, Facilities Management College, to offer degree courses.

Foresight

Many might have thought the establishment of FMI and its entry into facilities management services were moves to veer away from the parent company’s core business.

Bravo, however, disagrees to this thinking.

“It is, in fact, consistent with the line of business of U-Bix, as both are into the service business. In U-Bix, we do not only sell printers, we also provide services to customers 24/7. We maintain machines. With FMI, it is like just expanding the services we provide,” he says.

It was providential that, when Bravo took the step toward this direction, companies in the Philippines have also started embracing the practice of outsourcing—or farming out to other companies noncore operations and activities—to save on costs and focus more on their core operations.

“In the past several years, FMI’s business has been growing by at least 20 percent a year. It is only in recent years that growth has tapered off as the market matures,” he says.

Strategy

The company is currently concentrated in Metro Manila but it services the branches and operations of its clients in the provinces. Reaching out to more markets outside Metro Manila is, however, part of the company’s expansion strategy.

The target is to grow FMI to a P1-billion company in the next five years or less.

“We are now doing P600 million, we are hoping to hit our target within the next five years,” Bravo says. “The way to achieve this is to expand the business organically by improving its systems, offering new products and services, and by partnering with more companies outside Metro Manila.”

FMI is targeting to expand to Central and Western Visayas and Northern Mindanao, especially in key cities in these areas.

The company is currently focused on going green in its product and service offerings by shifting to the use of products that are environment-friendly and by continuously improving the efficiency in its delivery of services.

“We are introducing a new process of cleaning without the use of chemicals,” he says.

The firm is also continuously innovating on its services to address the peculiar requirements of the booming BPO sector. These businesses operate 24/7 with little time to spare for cleaning and maintenance.

“It is one area we are focusing now. We are coming up with systems that will ensure that cleaning and maintenance of BPO/call centers will cause the least possible disruption to operations.”

Bravo says the company is working hard to meet the specific requirements of each client.

“We listen to customers, we address their specific needs and concerns. We take care of them.”