Optimizing Facilities: Leverage Key Performance Indicators to Drive Solutions
In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, the need for efficient, adaptable facilities is paramount. Property owners and facility managers, architects, planners, and builders play a crucial role in ensuring that structures not only conform to current standards but also anticipate future demands. A vital tool of this process is the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These custom and carefully calibrated metrics offer valuable data for evaluating and enhancing facility performance, conducting gap analyses, and creating a strategic roadmap to achieve organizational goals. Additionally, they help assess the financial impact, facilitating the effective allocation of investments within common budgetary constraints.
Understanding and Defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs are quantifiable metrics that enable organizations to assess their performance against specific objectives. By focusing on objective data points, KPIs help eliminate subjectivity, offering a clear picture of an organization’s standing relative to its goals. For facility managers and planners, KPIs facilitate strategic planning and performance optimization, empowering teams to align their facilities with pre-determined benchmarks and standards.
An effective KPI strategy starts with constructing a comprehensive framework that outlines an organization’s primary areas of focus. These usually include measures like operational utility, safety, security, programming, and technology integration. Each category can be further broken down into subcategories, allowing organizations to address specific needs—for instance, ensuring that existing science labs are adequate and functional or that technology infrastructure can support the needs of its intended users.
Engaging Stakeholders + Continuous Data Collection = Reliable Results
Collaboration with clients to understand their priorities and vision is vital. Engaging in continuous dialogue helps uncover how existing, aging facilities can be transformed into modern, adaptive spaces that meet contemporary needs. This process necessitates aligning operational capabilities with strategic objectives through ongoing discussions.
Robust data collection anchored with key performance metrics is essential for evaluating the current state of facilities. A comprehensive facilities condition assessment (FCA) can serve as a vehicle for this evaluation, but FCA data is typically not intended to expose functional needs or requirements. By assessing how spaces are used beyond the brick-and-mortar and analyzing the qualitative and functional aspects of the infrastructure, organizations gain deeper insights into existing constraints. This understanding allows decision makers to analyze holistic needs through multiple lenses, not only from a facility condition standpoint but also in developing an optimal environment that meets the programmatic needs of the occupants within each facility. This information can be factored into comparing usage against established standards to set achievable goals.
A frequent and useful KPI is suitability, which reflects how well a building meets its occupants' needs, programmatic function, and capacity. Evaluating suitability helps determine the ability to accommodate users and specific space programming to meet the desired functional objectives. Similarly, measuring adaptability allows organizations to identify opportunities for repurposing structures and to recognize limitations. For example, such an assessment could lead to the recommendation to convert an older hospital into an administrative office building, utilizing the existing useful attributes of the facility.
A recent study with a large southwestern university used KPI tools to:
- Outline the condition of existing laboratories and support spaces
- Provide insight into how lab inventory and equipment support research needs
- Rank the condition of each space for comparative analysis
- Gain full understanding of what currently exists in each space and what is necessary to modernize spaces that do not meet new standards
- Support future science faculty recruitment
To achieve this level of detail, KPIs were developed to assess the following main categories and subcategories:
- Functionality
- gas, sinks, electrical, exhaust, storage
- Safety
- emergency shut off, eye wash, fire protection, hazmat
- Americans with Disability Act (ADA) compliance
- accessible height and ease of access in workspaces
- Appearance
- ceilings, windows, natural light, walls
- Building mechanics
- backup power, electrical capacity, HVAC and plumbing
Numerous successful projects across various sectors illustrate the effectiveness of using KPIs in facility optimization. For instance, universities that have implemented KPI strategies to assess laboratory spaces have noted improvements in adaptability and academic outcomes. Similarly, municipal facilities have benefited from customized assessments revealing actionable insights for relocation and consolidation of staff and repurposing existing assets for new-found usefulness as opposed to constructing a new facility.
The following transformative outcomes have been achieved using KPI data to inform planning in an education setting:
- Improved equity and efficiency, uniting two school districts
- Converting a surplus campus into a Pre-K and child development center
- Public school/university collaboration to locate a high school science laboratory on a local college campus
- Districtwide grade reconfiguration to optimize facility use
Using KPIs to Measure Sustainability and Decarbonization Initiatives
In addition to optimizing facilities for current needs, it is essential to consider sustainability and decarbonization, and thoughtful KPIs designed for decision making, as part of the long-term strategy. Many organizations face mandates to achieve net-zero carbon emissions, so incorporating energy-efficient systems and practices into facility management is crucial. Projects such as upgrading outdated HVAC units identified in a facility condition assessment (FCA) can be coupled together with energy conservation measures (ECMs) to reduce energy consumption significantly and lower operating costs over time. By understanding the FCA and ECMs the return on investment of such upgrades is substantially more compelling; thus, organizations can make informed decisions and investments that align with both facility needs and sustainability goals.
The integration of KPIs provides property owners, facility managers, architects, and planners with a robust framework to drive meaningful improvements in facilities. By establishing clear KPI strategies and engaging stakeholders, organizations can create optimized, sustainable, and adaptable spaces that enhance user experience and support broader organizational missions. This comprehensive approach empowers stakeholders to navigate challenges and seize opportunities for growth, ultimately preparing facilities to meet both current and future demands.
The FOScore® KPI module represents a significant advance in facilities management. Using a data-informed approach, the system provides objective insights, for confidence in decision making and efficient resource allocation. Versatility across all sectors and integration with facility master planning make the FOScore® KPI module a powerful tool for optimizing the built environment. The customizable creation of a weighted hierarchical rubric within the module ensures a balanced evaluation, and its mobile-friendly interface streamlines performing a KPI assessment into a single site visit for the collection of the desired inputs. The system’s capacity for comprehensive data analysis and clear visualization further empowers organizations to prioritize improvements and create more effective and conducive spaces once the metrics are collected.
Our diverse team of professionals possesses the expertise to develop appropriate and targeted KPIs in collaboration with our clients. These KPIs are designed to capture and measure the relevant data necessary for achieving various institutional goals. Understanding what to study and track, where to find it, and how it relates to and impacts the organizational environment is crucial–the drive for improvement requires that we measure the right factors.
FOS recognizes that each facility is unique, so we offer tailored solutions. In addition to the KPI module, the FOScore® suite includes modules for facility condition assessments, estimating, escalation, planning, and total cost of ownership.
For more information on ways FOS of CannonDesign can assist you, reach out to: [email protected] or visit our website at www.foscd.com.
