Facilities and Real Estate Management (FREM) Series, Part 4
Welcome to part 4 of our facilities and real estate management (FREM) series. In part 1, we introduced the top 6 challenges faced by facility managers, and in part 2 and part 3, we discussed the details of the first four challenges. You can review parts 1, 2, and 3 by clicking the links above.
Here in part 4 we’ll look at the last two of the top six challenges: facility condition assessment, and controlling cost.
Facility Condition Assessment
When assessing facility condition, facility managers must consider many questions, including:
- How much capital is needed to remediate a particular facility / building / asset?
- At what point do we need to seriously consider keeping or disposing of a building?
- Is our environment one that is inviting to employees, students, and/or the public?
- How do we manage our entire portfolio over the next 10 years? 20 years? 30 years?
- Are there pragmatic opportunities to leverage bulk purchases? And will those bulk purchases still be useful in the long run?
- Where should the condition of each facility / building / asset be so we can be sure that we are budgeting / investing the proper amount?
- How can we best invest capital to meet organizational needs?
To answer these questions, a periodic assessment of a facility’s condition is an absolute must. Facility managers are required to maintain a facility condition index (FCI) for each facility.
Mathematically, the FCI is represented as:
current replacement value of the facility(ies)
Managing and tracking all of the historic FCI data is another challenge faced by facility managers. FREM solutions exist that can help solve this challenge by maintaining and analyzing all of the FCI data.
Controlling Cost
Every organization examines operating and maintenance (O&M) expenses and analyzes ways to reduce cost, increase efficiency, reduce risk, and optimize resources. Finding ways to improve the infrastructure with a reduced budget can be very challenging for any facility manager.
To help keep costs in check, regular monitoring of the maintenance budget is one the most critical activities to perform. Getting quick and easy access to cost reports can be a major challenge for facility managers. In every organization, this data often resides in so many different tools or systems that generating the reports becomes a very time consuming and difficult task for the facility manager.
Fortunately, software solutions exist to help manage the monitoring and reporting processes. Choosing one that is part of an enterprise-wide, end-to-end solution can help facility managers improve accuracy and efficiency, monitoring, and reporting, and subsequently, reduce cost.
