Anyone involved in the long-term planning of an organization understands the fundamental need to achieve optimal use of building space and resources. To meet this challenge, facilities managers are increasingly turning to facility management best practices – ranging from employing proven assessment methodologies, to setting benchmarks, to integrating Web-architected capital planning software.
Most facility managers bring to their posts years of hands-on experience effectively responding to emergencies and resolving typical daily issues. Yet a proactive approach to facility management – one that sets the agenda ahead of day-to-day responsibilities – will save money, utilize personnel and budget resources more effectively and bring the organization closer to accomplishing its mission and objectives. That requires delegating work – a lot of routine work – and focusing on future projects and plans. The facility manager who operates as a strategist becomes an important ally to top-level executives and helps the organization set a course for growth and success.
To move away from managing just facility problems and become a part of the organization’s strategic direction, facility managers must strive to change how chief financial officers, presidents and administrators view their work. Strategically linking facilities planning goals to organizational missions is of critical importance in changing management’s perspective. A key to this is found through establishing enterprise-wide communications of facilities conditions, needs and planning guidelines across all departments.
Excellent facility management begins with a thorough understanding of the organization’s mission and goals. Whether an organization is charged with attracting the world’s best and brightest students, providing affordable healthcare, or cultivating a loyal employee base, facilities should be at the heart of any organization’s planning. If a pharmaceutical company decides to boost its efforts in genetic research or a manufacturing plant plans to double its production, facility managers need to lead the way with a plan to help make those goals happen.
Proven facility management best practices are also closely aligned and embedded within software that yields high data integrity and reuse, while assuring efficient, high-value facilities audits that maximize the focus on capital infrastructure issues. Extensive experience and a reproducible, scalable assessment methodology are needed to assure valid information.
Establishing Benchmarks
The first step in establishing a best-practice approach is gathering a solid, accurate information baseline by means of a facilities condition audit. This audit of the existing infrastructure, both physical and programmatic, will determine the current state and needs of those facilities. An in-house staff, an outside consulting firm or a combination of both can complete a facility audit.
Using the information collected from an audit, facility managers can establish benchmarks for building-to-building comparisons. The most widely used index is the facility condition index. The FCI measures the repair cost of a structure over its total replacement value.
For example, a building that has a replacement value of $1 million and a repair cost of $100,000 will have an FCI of 0.1 – a “fair” condition ranking. The larger a building’s FCI is, the worse its physical condition. The FCI can be applied to an entire building portfolio or a specific system within the overall organization. As FCIs are based on detailed and current building information, they play an important role in capital planning. Facility managers can use FCIs as leverage with key funding sources in determining whether the cost of repair will add value to the organization or if it would be more effective long-term to forego renovation and begin anew.
Using these metrics, building managers can demonstrate to upper level decision-makers, agency employees and government officials that, in some cases, it actually costs less to maintain the building at a good condition of 0.1 than to maintain the building at a higher FCI.
Effective, strategic facility planning must be based on objective, accurate information. Only a facility manager has the means to assess a multi-building portfolio and develop baseline data upon which facility planning can be based. Ideally, baseline facilities data takes office politics out of the equation of building renewal and construction. No longer will the most persistent department head receive priority funding for building requests when the numbers prove resources must be allocated elsewhere. Plus, facility managers can advocate facility priorities based on the organization’s overall mission – not the desires of individual department heads and administrators.
Technology plays a critical role in implementing facility management best practices when budgets, personnel and time are limited. A Web-based capital planning and management solutions system combines the industry’s best technology and business approach under one method. CPMS integrated with Web technology enables managers to plan for the long-term care of their facilities and obtain the highest level of performance and operation. Strategic planning and Web technology solutions lead to improvements in efficiency, associated returns on capital investment and the reinforcement of the link between the facilities and the mission of the organization. A significant adjustment toward proactive facility management will empower organizations with the abilities to maximize time, money and manpower in facility management.
CPMS enable facility managers to gather knowledge culled from an audit to measure and document physical plant conditions precisely. It provides a common technology platform for data entry, storage, analysis and reporting of facilities. Managers are able to link facilities that are spread out across an entire portfolio under a core management program. Using a Web-based system, managers can remotely access, review and update facility conditions of the entire building portfolio and make well-educated recommendations. The system can even be linked with space planning systems and a computerized maintenance and management system to create an integrated approach to facilities management. Ultimately, CPMS links the mission of the organization to its facilities by communicating the importance of proactive facility maintenance to all levels within the organization.
In addition, the future of the CPMS Web technology solution enables easy prioritization and an efficient method to plan and budget multiple repair or renewal projects. For example, capital projects can be aggregated based upon various priorities such as bundling like projects to take advantage of bulk procurements or linking related projects. These capital projects can be exported to project scheduling software such as MSProject as well as CMMS systems to optimize overall project management and to create work orders.
In today’s world, where security and building vulnerability issues need to be addressed as key elements in any property management program, so do best-practice facility management. Having a comprehensive picture of a complete facility portfolio is a critical step to managing and mitigating risk and building vulnerability.
Facility and security managers must work together to implement a lifecycle assessment approach to identify the potential risks and hazards in building security. A rational, consistent process for conducting assessments is essential to understanding what is in the facility portfolio and identifying vulnerabilities. Equipped with such baseline data, security managers are able to measure possible risks against established security standards, such as a structural guideline designed to help resist progressive collapse or the use of gates and non-climbable fences and then estimate the dollars required to alleviate vulnerabilities.
