The role of facilities maintenance departments is fundamentally to provide service to the organization with focus on business priorities and most importantly, the end users. This being the high-level view may not translate, in this manner, to day-to-day activities or responsibilities.
Facilities managers often have to deal with varied tasks ranging from daily/periodic maintenance work, vendor/contractor engagement, projects, budgets, phone calls and emails. There is also the ever-present emergency and unplanned maintenance activities which continually requires balancing the strategic and tactical aspects of work.
To be performance driven and result-oriented, facilities managers must understand the importance of and how to utilize metrics. However, most facilities managers often wonder if they could ever capture perfect metrics and how best to communicate such data to the leaders that helps them see the achievements and importance of their facilities.
Interestingly, in the absence of a perfect set of metrics, facilities managers try to figure out which metrics are helpful and meaningful to communicate to their teams and leaders.
Metrics usually include customer satisfaction rates, percentage of work orders by type, corrective to preventive maintenance ratio, staff training hours index, facilities condition index and work order completion rate.
Knowing what metrics to capture is the starting point and requires understanding the identity of the organization. It is important to know what the organization values,its mission, the end users and what is critical to them. The mission-critical element for one office-work facility was to make sure employees could always get to their electronic files regardless of geographic location or facility utility interruption.
This method underscores the facility strategy of facilities managers. They start with what is most important to the organization and its people. This allows them to focus on the elements of the facilities that are vital. Once managers understand this aspect, the rest of the programme can go forward in that context.
The next step is to identify the communication plan. There are typically three groups of people that need specific information:
•Technicians benefit from process metrics such as preventive maintenance compliance, ratio of preventive maintenance to corrective maintenance, system downtime and the number of facility-related occupant complaints by type.
•Managers need to understand programme or business elements, such as budget variance, productivity, environmental compliance, and safety and security compliance.
•Organizational leaders need to understand the way facilities are performing related to strategic outcomes, such as customer satisfaction, facility or critical system downtime, business continuity, environmental impact, facility condition index, and environmental, social and governmental compliance.
Monitoring and reporting metrics also requires understanding the role of technology such as computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), integrated work management system (IWMS) or enterprise asset management system (EAMS). These systems can be in credibly useful in providing data about specific systems or activities, such as work order completion rates and process metrics
One other important element in understanding metrics related to the facility strategy and organizational outcomes is having an accurate inventory of the assets under facility management care.
As facilities managers work through their plans for determining the metrics that will work best for their organizations, the following points are useful:
•Know your organization and what is critical to it.
•Determine who needs to know what. The leaders typically have a longer-term view and need to know about issues related to reliability, budget, investment needs and corporate goals. Technicians need immediate data on equipment and system performance.
•Measure only what is needed. More data and information can create more work without benefit.
•Measure trends over time. This process helps identify whether initiatives and activities work, allowing for adjustments to be made to help the team succeed.
•Understand the technology, facilities systems and equipment your department is responsible for.
•Avoid another facility organization’s metrics, has little or no value.
In concluding, for facilities managers to succeed, they need to combine technology systems with knowledge of the facilities/organization to identify metrics that are truly meaningful at various levels of interaction.
