Why benchmarking is one of the most powerful tools available to an asset manager

What is benchmarking?

The International Facility Management Association (IFMA) defines benchmarking as “a continuous and systematic management process that measures work processes, protocols and services for the purpose of organizational comparison and improvement.”

What does this mean?

The ability to assess various aspects of your operations in relation to similar organisations, as well as documented industry best practices.

Benchmarking will allow you to gain control and insight into your maintenance spending by helping you identify costly or inefficient processes or areas within the building profile.

Participating in benchmarking will allow you to:

• Compareyour performance with other organisations;
• Determine which costs to investigatefirst for quick results;
• Develop and support ideas and proposals to improve your organisation’s performanceand contribute to the bottom line;
• Locate hidden opportunitiesto assist you in demonstrating your value;
• Assist you in preserving your resourcesfrom budget cut backs;

It will give you an increased ability to make smarter and more strategic decisions regarding spending and develop plans designed to help you make improvements or adopt best practices.

When you implement a maintenance benchmark program, you will quickly learn if the level of your maintenance spending is comparable to other similar facilities.

It will also help you identify those categories where your spending is higher than it should be, based on industry or market averages.

Budget Forecasting

Benchmarking can also be used for budgeting purposes and can assist in the procurement and negation of service contractors and utilities when armed with such crucial information.

Ensuring Success Of Your Maintenance Benchmark Program

Simply implementing a maintenance benchmark program does not guarantee its success or result in increased savings. To ensure success, it is important that your benchmarks are analyzed in relation to comparable sites and other industry data.

Not only do you need to consider such factors as the size, location, function and age of the facility, you also need to make sure you are comparing similar services and processes. If you are benchmarking against a particular industry or industry segment, you also need to make sure the scope of work and service level agreements (SLA) are consistent.

The aim of the benchmarking exercise is to evaluate facility management performances in order to establish comparison between comparable facilities and establish best practices. This will allow Facility Managers to develop plans on how to make improvements or adapt specific best practices, with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance. The output can be used in a predictive cost model for the maintenance costs.

The approach to the benchmark was to define a series of meaningful outcome indicators (e.g. Number of Work Orders, Cost) and relate them to Factors (e.g. Gross Floor Area (GFA), Number of Occupants).

These indicators can be further segmented in different categories for example by building element, type of work order and they will be evaluated over time to analyse to see if there are some trends.