Facilities Management is increasingly becoming of strategic significance to organisations. All businesses can essentially be broken into two larger parts – The core business and non-core business. The non-core business, or support services play an essential role to enable the organisation to operate at its most efficient. This in turn reflects in competitive advantage, profitability, sustainability, and value to the customer. The emerging complexity of facility management over recent years has stirred up great debate on what is a Facility Manager and what skills and training should that person have. One half of the debate argues that a FM should as a minimum have a trade or engineering background. Others will argue that managing contractors, business acumen and client relationships are of more importance. What is clear is that the profession is changing, and far more skills and attributes are now required to be effective and successful. Training providers and educators are rushing in to fill the void and bridge the perceived capability gaps with a range of courses and programs including post-graduate degrees. Skilled and experienced FMs are now finding themselves in very senior roles within their organisation further highlighting the emerging strategic importance of this function.
An organisations buildings and infrastructure assets represent a significant investment, and it is the job of Facilities Managers to protect the investment and ensure that this expenditure item is viewed as an added value to the business. An ever-present challenge for FMs is providing an industry best practice support service on limited maintenance budgets and there is always pressure from finance managers to look for savings in the non-core business. With running cost accounting for a large percentage of company expenditure this shouldn’t be a surprise, but it must be recognised that cost and quality are firmly linked and cannot be considered separately. Reducing or limiting maintenance budgets may appear attractive to those looking through a financial frame of reference or bias but is unlikely to produce long term savings and certainly increases risk to an organisations reputation, operations, safety, competitiveness and the ability to deliver value to customers.
A maintenance strategy cannot realistically be formulated without knowledge of the organisations business model and fundamental objective, but this is what often unintentionally occurs. The maintenance department is relegated to a reactive support service rather than an integrated strategic part of the business structure, critical in delivering on the customer value proposition.
Key considerations when formulating a facilities management strategy are the organisations objectives, risk mitigation policies, business operational plans and the space/accommodation strategy. Facility management must effectively support and enhance the core business, and certainly should encompass the principles of business administration, engineering, architectural and behavioural sciences. Other important factors of a facilities management plan are.
With the above considerations you can start to apply a strategy development process such as the following.
Once a strategy has been selected the next stage is its implementation. Operational frameworks and policies can be developed and implemented via a change management process. With any strategy, poor implementation is an issue, and the plan should include a risk analysis and mitigation and performance measures as a means to monitor progress. Facilities management can be a very dynamic and reactive field and it is best to select a strategy which provides enough flexibility to adapt to changing market forces, technology, and shifts in government and regulatory obligations.
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The positives and negatives of outsourcing have long been a source of debate within the facilities management industry. The positives of course are increased innovation, reduced administration, reduced risk, and cost savings due to economies of scale and scope and also the harsh realities of competition. The advantage is even more relevant when you are referring to multiple sites over large geographical areas. The argument for not out-sourcing may relate to strategic reasons, protecting valuable and sensitive information, losing control on performance, losing core expertise and general principal/agent issues. Quality control issues can be somewhat mitigated by having an effective procurement and contract management process and a partnering arrangement is becoming increasingly common. The decision to out-source in addition to the reasons given above can simply come down to a matter of transactional cost. In other words, if another company can provide a service more efficiently and cost effective than your organisation than it should be considered. The problem is that total cost is often under reported and all direct and indirect cost should be identified if you are to accurately assess the merits of out-sourcing services.
A key component of a facilities management strategy these days is sustainability and the environment. Efficient operation of buildings and assets in addition to being beneficial for the environment and reduced impact on resources also helps to reduce lifecycle operating cost and boost occupant productivity. The term “green” building is becoming increasingly common and the challenge for facilities management is to formulate maintenance strategies which integrate “green” principles into their processes and procedures. Some of the sustainability issues faced by facilities managers are.
Choosing the right maintenance strategy provides the opportunity for professional Facilities Managers to have a significant impact on organisational outcomes and performance in tangible but also intangible ways. It is evident that the field of facilities management is becoming increasingly complex and today requires many different skills similar in many ways to a general manager.
