Meet Concerto:

Property Management Powering

200,000 BUILDINGS

Now John Rowan and Partners has joined Bellrock Group, it pays to get to know our sister brands. Property management sits at the heart of our new family, and few companies push that frontier further than Concerto.

Concerto began life in 2004 as a public sector project management platform. At the time, government initiatives like the Soft Landings Framework were helping assets transition from construction to operation. That put the focus on improving property management practices.

The team knew they could pivot to something the market sorely needed. A short, rapid evolution took Concerto from project management to managing the assets which housed those projects. Today, it’s a true integrated workplace management system (IWMS). That’s an important point. A real IWMS takes an asset from an undeveloped field to a functioning facility, and onwards throughout its entire lifecycle. Many businesses claim to provide an IWMS, but really they’ve got a bunch of different platforms each handling different stages. Concerto is the genuine article.

How does Concerto help facilities managers?

Facilities like hospitals and universities don’t stop evolving, so neither can Concerto. Right now, the industry’s emphasis is moving from bare-bones property maintenance to optimising occupants’ experience. Comfort, convenience and wellbeing are the order of the day. Obviously, that means something different to every individual property.

The Concerto team are helping facilities managers meet their unique needs by providing a modular approach to the platform. They can choose only the elements that they need, instead of buying a massive solution and only using a quarter of it.

“Improved sensor technology is a big area of focus, as is AI. Ideally, in a hypothetical tomorrow, the platform could tell who would be working in a building on any given day. It could automatically adjust conditions to the occupants’ preferred temperature.”

This certainly streamlines the onboarding process, but it’s still a journey. The deeper value of working with Concerto lies in getting to think critically about how work gets done. The complexities of change management and digital transformation can take three to six months to implement. Anyone who tells you it’s a quick, easy process isn’t giving you the facts.

But that opportunity to raise service standards is where Concerto really shines. For example, most people come to them with compliance issues at first. These challenges are familiar to anyone who’s ever spoken to a property manager:

• Moving away from spreadsheet records

• Replacing old desktop-based lease management systems with cloud solutions

• Opening up greater transparency with contractors and suppliers

Consolidating all of a business’ compliance regimes into Concerto might not necessarily be the quickest job. But once an organisation is onboarded, it gets easier to start gathering data and spotting opportunities for more in-depth improvements.

The team exists to facilitate this process. Concerto’s consultants are drawn from the ranks of construction and property experts, not so much from among the software guys. That means, from day one, they can help clients spot ways to futureproof operations after solving their immediate needs.

The next steps for integrated workplace management

What’s next for Concerto?

Improved sensor technology is a big area of focus, as is AI. Ideally, in a hypothetical tomorrow, the platform could tell who would be working in a building on any given day. It could automatically adjust conditions to the occupants’ preferred temperature, and even work out a seating plan to help colleagues collaborate more easily.

Of course, that also has big potential ramifications for areas like fire safety. Better monitoring and more intelligent responses can help protect occupants as well as keep them cosy. No matter how advanced data reporting gets, that data has to be actionable in order to add tangible value.

At a time when other providers are scrambling to introduce and test new features, Concerto is busy perfecting its core capabilities. New clients like the University of Manchester and Legal & General are sources of high-quality feedback. These windows into what facilities managers really need in the 2020s create opportunities to refine the market’s best IWMS.

As part of Bellrock, the Concerto team look forward to continually pushing the envelope. And as another of John Rowan and Partners’ new sister brands, we look forward to showing you more of what they can do in the future.