Facilities management in Brazil: the risks leaders can't see

Facilities management teams in Brazil use more specialist software than the average. Even so, they complain the most about the maintenance reports they get. Two in three (65.2%) say their current system falls short on reporting, the highest rate of any market analysed in Infraspeak's report, The State of FM Operations 2027.

The software has arrived. Trust in the numbers hasn't.

The report calls this the visibility gap: the risks and results that facilities leaders can't see or measure. In Brazil, it shows up more strongly than anywhere else. Here's where it comes from and where to start closing it.

What does the report show about facilities management in Brazil?

Brazil is the report's largest market: more than 380 facilities teams (34.9% of the sample), spoken to between September 2025 and September 2026. Two thirds are small and medium-sized businesses (65.9%), and facilities service providers are the largest group (29.2%), followed by offices and other property owners (16.3%), industrial and energy sites (16.0%) and retail (14.5%).

The picture holds a contradiction that's hard to ignore:

More dedicated software, fewer stitched-together tools and still less clarity. Almost half of teams don't fully trust the data in their own system. And it's hard to take a number to the board when you don't believe it yourself.

Why hasn't more software produced better reports?

Because the problem starts before the report. If the data arrives incomplete, late or retyped, no dashboard can fix it. And in Brazil, manual work is still everywhere: 91.0% of teams cite manual processes as a pain point, and 81.6% say their current system still forces them to do manual work.

One of the stories in the report sums up the picture. An engineering company described the office team's routine: downloading the data sent from the field, cleaning it all up by hand, typing it into spreadsheets and attaching photos to build client reports. That's 3,000 to 6,000 PDF reports per project. Somewhere between PDF number 1 and number 6,000, someone will type the wrong date (and nobody will notice until the client asks).

Software that doesn't record the work at source becomes just one more place where someone copies information. The report comes out looking good, but its foundation is still typing. If you want to go deeper into what a good report needs, our guide to facilities management reports is worth a read.

Where data gets lost: in the handoffs

Facilities management in Brazil is a team sport, played on many fields at once. 70.8% of teams work with mixed in-house and external teams, and 69.6% manage more than one site. Every contractor, every site and every technician is a handoff, and that's where information hits the floor.

A food retail chain with 36 stores receives preventive maintenance reports by email from eight different contractors. Each one comes in its own format, at its own pace, in its own PDF. The result is a flood of attachments the team can neither process nor keep track of. The maintenance was done (probably). Proving it is another story.

The problem weighs on both sides of the contract:

• If you're a service provider, your clients want proof: photos, timestamps, signatures. Without it, the quality of your work comes down to taking your word for it.

• If you manage your own buildings, you depend on the data your contractors send, when they send it. Supplier performance stays invisible until something breaks.

A good part of this is a problem of communication in facilities management, and one more WhatsApp group won't solve it.

What does it cost to not trust your maintenance reports?

First, it costs time. A logistics operator said they spend two days a month putting together management reports by hand. By the time the numbers are ready, they're already out of date.

Then it costs influence. Facilities management touches costs, risk, compliance and everyone's experience of the building, but it's hard to win a seat at the board table without numbers that leadership trusts. The report's global data shows how far this can go: one in six teams (17.4%) couldn't give a single number on how their operation performs. No SLA compliance, no cost per site, no backlog.

And finally, it costs what you're not seeing. In Brazil, compliance comes up less as a pain point than in other markets (20.2%, against 29.5% overall). That doesn't mean the risk is lower. It may just mean nobody is looking at it, until the day an auditor does.

Why is visibility still a gap, even with software?

The report's recommendation for Brazil is direct: first, make sure the data behind every report is complete and reliable. Then pick a few numbers and present them regularly. In practice, that comes down to four steps:

1. Record the work once, at source. The technician records the job while carrying it out, with photo and signature, and that same data feeds the report, the invoicing and the planning. Nobody retypes anything.

2. Put contractors in the same record. If the service provider records the job in the same place as your team, the preventive maintenance report stops being a PDF lost in an inbox.

3. Take the admin out of people's hands. Request triage, duplicates, follow-ups: it's repetitive work, and it's where automation in FM and maintenance makes a difference. The decisions (what's urgent, what's worth the spend, which supplier to trust) stay with the team.

4. Pick one or two numbers that matter to leadership. SLA compliance, cost per site. Present them every month and build the conversation with the board from there. If you're not sure where to start, the most widely used maintenance indicators are a good starting point.

How Infraspeak helps close these gaps

Infraspeak, the collaborative facilities management platform, was built around one idea: FM needs to work as a single connected system.

• One record for everyone. In-house teams, contractors, suppliers and clients work in the same environment. With Infraspeak Network, suppliers work inside the same operation as the teams they serve, and the history stays with the asset, no matter who holds the contract.

• Automation that takes work away instead of creating it. Infraspeak Gear AI handles the admin using the data already in the platform, with no sensors needed to get started. Every workflow can include a human approval step. Gear AI suggestions are accepted 75% of the time, and automations save teams up to eight hours a week of admin work.

• Numbers you can take to the board. When data is recorded once, at source, the report stops being a reconstruction at the end of the month and becomes a picture of the operation.

What is The State of FM Operations 2027 report?

The State of FM Operations 2027 is a report from Infraspeak, the collaborative facilities management platform, on how facilities teams run their operations. It covers the tools they rely on, what holds them back, who they work with and what's pushing them to change. It's based on conversations with 1,071 facilities teams over 12 months. Most were in Brazil, Portugal, Spain and the UK, with France and the rest of Latin America also represented.

Most are small and medium-sized organisations. SMEs make up 59.0% of the sample, mid-market companies 32.5% and large companies 8.5%. Facilities service providers are the largest single group (31.9%). The other two thirds run their own buildings, from industrial and energy sites to offices, retail and hospitality.

The typical facilities team runs a mixed, multi-site operation. Three in four (74.5%) combine in-house and external maintenance teams, and 68.1% manage more than one site.

An honest caveat: most of these teams were already assessing how they run FM. That makes the report a good thermometer of where the pressure is, but less representative of teams that are happy with their current setup.

Read the full report

The Brazil numbers are one part of the story. The State of FM Operations 2027 covers the three FM gaps (admin, connection and visibility), the pictures for Portugal, Spain, the UK and France, and five steps for 2027.

Access the full report