Same defect, two technicians: where FM collaboration breaks down

One operation runs its field work through a WhatsApp group per city. The same defect got reported twice, and two technicians got sent to fix it. Nobody did anything wrong. The job just lived in two places at once.

The State of FM Operations 2027: The FM Gaps calls this the connection gap, and it's where facilities management collaboration tends to fall apart: between the in-house team, the contractor, the supplier and the client, who all work on the same building but not in the same system. Here's what it looks like, what it costs, and where to start closing it.

What is the connection gap in facilities management?

The connection gap is the breakdowns between in-house teams, suppliers, contractors and clients who work on the same buildings but not on the same system. It's one of three gaps the report finds in FM operations, alongside the admin gap and the visibility gap.

The numbers come from conversations with 1,071 FM teams between September 2025 and September 2026:

Put the first and third rows together and nine in ten teams (91.6%) run mixed teams, more than one site, or both. FM has become a team sport played across many buildings, and most of the players are on different systems.

Why do FM operations break down at the handoffs?

Because every handoff is a chance for a job to fall between two tools. An update stuck in an inbox, a work order that never reached the contractor, two teams working from different versions of the truth. The work usually gets done. What goes missing is everything around it: who's on it, where it's at, what happened last time.

The report heard plenty of versions of this:

• A restaurant group with 20 sites manages maintenance through Slack, Teams, phone calls and email, with a different set of suppliers at each store.

• In one hotel, every maintenance request goes through the hotel director before it reaches a technician.

• Several organisations said their asset history lives in their suppliers' systems.

In each of these setups, one person ends up acting as the connector between everyone else. When they're on holiday, so is the operation. Better habits help, and this guide to communication in facilities management covers the basics, but habits can't fix a handoff spread across Slack, Teams, phone and email.

What does the connection gap cost an FM team?

Time, history and control over your suppliers. The breakdowns are small one by one, and they add up:

• Time. Every "What's the status?" becomes a call, an email or a WhatsApp message someone has to chase, and the chasing usually lands on the FM team.

• History. When the asset history lives in a supplier's system and the supplier changes, the maintenance history can leave with them. If you outsource maintenance services, that's a risk worth checking before the next contract renewal.

• Control. Without shared, live data, you can only judge a supplier on what they report back, which usually means tickets closed.

There's a cost for AI too. Automation, reporting and prediction are only as useful as what they can see, and if half the work lives in a supplier's app and a technician's WhatsApp, they see half the operation.

Is the connection gap the same in every market?

Every market runs on mixed teams and multiple sites. Where they differ is in how the handoffs fail:

• Brazil. Close to the global picture: 70.8% run mixed in-house and external teams and 69.6% manage more than one site (74.5% and 68.1% overall). One food retail network with 36 stores receives preventive maintenance reports by email from eight different contractors, a flood of PDFs it can't process or track.

• Portugal. Also close to the global picture (71.9% mixed teams, 70.8% multi-site), and fewer teams complain about communication (25.0%, against 33.2%). At one cleaning contractor, a single client sends 10 to 15 incident emails a day, and supervisors on night shifts process each one by hand, which delays the response.

• Spain. 77.3% name fragmented systems as a pain (70.1% overall). One company handles incidents for 75 centres with a four-person team on Excel, email and phone, and chases job status by ringing stores and branches, because phone calls leave no record.

• UK. 84.7% run mixed in-house and external maintenance teams, the highest of any market (74.5% overall), and almost all (97.5%) have mixed teams, multiple sites or both. At one local authority, the helpdesk process is "double handling": the in-house team logs a job, it "hops over the fence" to the FM provider, and the provider assigns a priority and shares the information back.

• France. Half of FM teams (51.1%) say their current setup lacks integration, against 41.5% overall, and 80.4% run mixed teams. One stadium operator has almost no visibility of its main maintenance provider's performance data, which it described as flying blind, and runs its own operations across five separate tools.

How do you improve facilities management collaboration?

Get everyone who touches the building working from the same record. When the contractor sees the job, the client sees the progress and the history stays with the asset, whoever holds the contract, the handoffs stop failing. In practice, that's three moves:

1. Connect everyone who touches the building. In-house teams, contractors, suppliers and clients working from the same record. The report calls it the fastest way to close the connection gap, and the foundation for everything else. The supplier who handles the most jobs is a good place to start.

2. Capture the work once, at the source. Requests come in through one channel and technicians log jobs as they do them, so nobody retypes a WhatsApp message into a spreadsheet and nothing depends on who was copied on the email.

3. Measure suppliers on what they influence. With shared, live data, you can judge a supplier on uptime, total cost, compliance risk and how happy the people in the building are. This piece on becoming a strategic partner shows what that relationship looks like from the supplier's side.

That's also why collaboration and AI work best as a pair. A connected operation gives AI the full picture, and agents take enough admin off people's plates for them to work together properly.

How Infraspeak helps close the connection gap

Infraspeak, the collaborative FM platform, is powered by agentic AI that keeps people in control. Here's how it applies to the connection gap.

• FM should run as one connected system. Infraspeak connects in-house teams, suppliers, contractors and clients in one shared environment, so work, data and accountability stop getting lost at the handoffs. With Infraspeak Network, suppliers work inside the same operation as the teams they serve, with real-time updates and in-app messages instead of messy email threads. Infraspeak Direct Portal lets customers create maintenance requests and track their status.

• Technology should take work away, and leave the judgement with people. Infraspeak Gear AI automates work order assignment, prioritisation and reporting, and every workflow can include a human approval step. Gear does the work. You call the shots.

• FM deserves a seat at the table. Detailed reports show suppliers' true performance, so supplier reviews run on evidence instead of whoever argues loudest.

Read the full report

The connection gap is one of three. The State of FM Operations 2027: The FM Gaps also covers the admin gap and the visibility gap, the findings for Brazil, Portugal, Spain, the UK and France, and five moves for 2027.

Access the full report →