Your portfolio operating costs keep rising. We’re going to map the four cost centres that typically drive the drift and show you why optimising them in isolation keeps backfiring.
You’ve already cut FM headcount, squeezed contractor margins, and deferred capital projects. Yet the numbers keep moving in the wrong direction. The problem usually isn’t effort. It’s that you’re optimising four separate cost centres without seeing how they connect.
Buildings are a big part of the cost and carbon equation. The buildings and construction sector accounts for about 36% of global final energy use and 37% of energy-related CO₂ emissions (IEA/UNEP GlobalABC, 2023). RICS whole-life costing guidance commonly notes that around 70–80% of total cost sits in operations rather than construction (RICS, 2017).
That means your decisions about people, contractors, equipment, and invesment today determine most of your cost base for years. Treating these as independent budget lines creates trade-offs that inflate total cost and risk.
How buildings are run today
Your buildings are complex operational environments. HVAC, controls, metering, lifts, fire systems and operational equipment all depend on people, contractors, plant, and capital decisions working in sync. Yet in most portfolios, the operating model hasn’t kept up with the complexity.
Your data sits in separate systems: BMS, energy meters, work orders, and spreadsheets. Reporting is retrospective. Workflows are manual. Responsibility is split across teams and vendors with limited visibility into each other’s work.
You end up spending more and getting less. Work becomes reactive, hard to prioritise, and difficult to audit. You see the impact across the four main areas where most money is spent: people, supply chain, capital, and strategic investment.
The four cost centres draining property portfolios
People
In our experience, labour is the biggest line item in FM. IFMA benchmarks frequently put labour at around 50% of FM service delivery cost across many portfolios (IFMA, 2019).
Your engineering and FM teams are highly skilled, but too much time goes to triaging noisy alarms, chasing point data, and coordinating vendors. That’s time you don’t spend on proactive optimisation, tenant engagement, or planned improvement work.
Supply chain
Your contractors operate across multiple systems with varying levels of accountability. Activity is often driven by planned visit schedules rather than verified need. Without shared data and clear prioritisation, you get duplicated effort, missed systemic faults, and premium-time call-outs.
Capital
Poor visibility drives faster degradation, more breakdowns, and earlier replacement of equipment. Guidance from bodies such as BOMA consistently warns that deferred maintenance tends to increase downstream cost and risk (BOMA, n.d.).
You might “save” this quarter, then pay in failures, tenant complaints, and forced replacements later.
Strategic investment
Your capital planning, sustainability strategy, and portfolio investment decisions are shaped by partial data and inconsistent benchmarks. That makes it harder to target NABERS, BREEAM, LEED, or ENERGY STAR improvements with confidence or make informed portfolio investment decisions. It also makes it harder to defend the business case for strategic shifts, because the baseline keeps changing.
Why optimising one cost centre often hurts the others
We see the same pattern across portfolios. You cut FM headcount to save on labour, then contractor costs rise as reactive call-outs multiply. Focusing on the lowest-price contractor encourages minimal compliance, not optimisation. Deferring capex boosts short-term cash but inflates future OPEX and reputational risk. Each isolated win creates a bill somewhere else.
What a unified operating model looks like
A unified operating model is not another dashboard. It is an operating system for how buildings are run. Building Operations AI (BOA), delivered gthrough CIM's PEAK Platform, connects BMS data, meters, equipment history, fault detection, contractor activity, and portfolio reporting into one closed-loop execution layer. Instead of insight sitting in one system and action happening in another, everything operates within the same structured framework.
Data is captured and normalised.
Faults are detected and diagnosed.
Impact is prioritised by cost, comfort, and risk.
Responsibility is assigned.
Work is tracked to completion.
Resolution is verified against live data.
Performance is benchmarked across the portfolio.
This is the difference between partial visibility and closed-loop execution.
You do not need perfect data to start. You will still spend time aligning point naming, validating asset registers, and agreeing ownership rules. But within a BOA model, that effort feeds directly into automation, accountability, and measurable outcomes rather than static reports.
For evidence that this type of structured approach can pay back, commissioning research is a useful reference point. A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory review of 643 buildings reported median whole-building energy savings of 16% from existing building commissioning, with a median simple payback of 1.1 years (LBNL, 2009). The difference with BOA is that continuous AI-driven monitoring and embedded workflow help you sustain and compound those gains long after the initial project ends.
How Building Operations AI (BOA) helps you optimise all four cost centres together
If optimising cost centres in isolation creates trade-offs, the answer is not more reports. It is a different operating model.
Building Operations AI aligns people, supply chain, capital, and strategy inside one AI-powered, outcome-driven system. Because detection, prioritisation, execution, and verification sit within the same loop, improvements in one area reinforce the others rather than shifting cost across budget lines.
People
BOA automates data structuring and diagnostics at scale, reducing alarm noise and manual analysis. Engineers receive prioritised, impact-ranked issues with clear ownership and tracked workflows. Time shifts from triage and coordination to optimisation and tenant outcomes. Performance is measured in verified issues resolved, not hours spent reviewing data.
Supply chain
Faults are linked directly to structured, trackable workflows. Issues are prioritised, assigned, escalated where required, and verified against live performance data. Repeat failures and systemic patterns become visible across sites and vendors. Contractors are measured on measurable outcomes and sustained improvement, not just attendance or SLA response times.
Capital
Continuous monitoring, digital fault histories, and AI-driven equipment health scoring provide evidence for repair-versus-replace decisions. Degradation trends are benchmarked across the portfolio, supporting better timing and risk management. Capital allocation becomes aligned with measured condition and operational impact, reducing both premature replacement and costly breakdowns.
Strategic investment
Because utility data, operational performance, workflow outcomes, and benchmarking are integrated, your baseline stabilises. Improvements are verified. ESG metrics reflect operational reality. Rating uplift and invesement strategies can be prioritised with confidence, supported by consistent portfolio-level data rather than fragmented snapshots.
Closed-loop execution is what connects the four cost centres. Instead of trading one objective against another, you operate the portfolio as a coordinated system focused on sustained performance, lower OPEX, stronger resilience, and measurable ESG progress.
