836 Alan Drive, Lake Orion, MI. 48362 rbuzard@comcast.net 248.935.

9097
FACILITIES MANAGEMENT | ENERGY CONSERVATION | PROCESS IMPROVEMENT | COST CONTROL

RICHARD E. BUZARD JR.

IS YOUR BUILDING IN REBELLION AGAINST YOUR PRODUCTS OR SERVICES?

What do you mean in rebellion? After all, if you have a business, you have to have a place where you operate it, even if it is a home office. Lets take a look at some of the more common symptoms of buildings in rebellion: 1. Not knowing what your real costs are, or what they should be. Youve simply been paying the bills each month as they come in and look at them as just the cost of doing business. 2. Runaway operating costs. Here, you know what your costs are and what they should be, but you are faced with rising costs for operations, maintenance, utilities, services, and so on without knowing why they are going up or ways to arrest and reverse the trend. 3. Growing number of employee workplace-related complaints and/or workers compensation claims. It is either too hot, too cold, too noisy, too smelly, too crowded, doesnt have enough space, has bad lighting, has poor quality janitorial and other services, or has more and more workers compensation claims due to a variety of health and workplace related issues. 4. High risk environments. In this case, the building has a large number of known or suspected safety and compliance issues or other factors that could lead to legal action if a casualty were to happen. 5. Non-supportive physical assets: Here, your facilities lack the capacity to support the work you need to do because of changes in technology and the way that business is done. A lot has happened in the last 10 to 20 years; technology continues to change, and buildings should be able to support these changes. How do you start to fix this? Just as Ive said in other articles, you have to know what you have and what condition it is in before you figure out how to reach your goals. If you are starting on a trip, you have to know where you are starting from and what you need if the trip is to be successful. This is no different. 1. Know what you have. Do a facility audit or inventory, or have one done by a facilities management specialist or provider. Youve got to know what condition the building and of all of the systems and equipment is in. What level of maintenance does each system or equipment need? Which need predictive, preventive, or only the bare minimum of maintenance? Do you have non-critical equipment with a low cost of replacement where it is more economical to run it to failure? 2. You may need to look for places where your facility is physically incapable of supporting the work you need to do by completing a facilities functionality and serviceability analysis. In this, you determine the functional needs of users and production groups in the facility and then evaluate how well the facility is physically capable of supporting those needs. 3. Retrocommissioning. In this step, you ensure that the building structure and each system or major equipment is performing to its design specification. This applies to the building envelope, roofing, heating and air conditioning, lighting, office, food service, and production equipment. If the building is older, or you have been deferring maintenance, youre likely to

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find a number of relatively low cost issues to correct. Dont take a pass on this! The next steps build on this steps successful completion. Benchmark your costs and operations and maintenance practices, including services provided by 3rd parties. If you have several similar buildings in the same geographic region, these costs should be in line with each other. In a like manner, maintenance and support actions and their costs should also be similar. The idea is to develop ways to do an apples to apples comparison using unit costs. In many cases, you can benchmark against national standards for costs or practices that are provided by a number of property or facilities management professional associations or publications such as those provided by RS Means. Evaluate your energy costs. Set up spreadsheet or other accounting systems to track monthly utility usage for each building. By comparing how much energy you use (for gas, electricity, oil, water and so on) and its monthly cost, you will come up with a monthly unit cost that can easily be transferred to a graph. Odd, out of season energy consumption trends are cause for concern. Again, you will also want to compare these unit costs across your entire portfolio and to regional and national standards. This is also a great way to detect potential billing errors and possibly get rebates or adjustments from your utility provider. Determine root causes. Ask Why and keep on asking until you get past the symptom to the bottom issue that is causing the problem. Maybe your utility costs are a lot higher than they should be. Why? It could be that the problem is your air conditioning and heating systems are using a lot more power than they should be. Why? Maybe this is due to dirty filters, causing it to work harder and use more power. Why? Have you been deferring maintenance? Why? Because you thought it was cheaper to leave it alone? Talk about the Law of Unintended Consequences. Even new buildings and systems require maintenance. Learn how to do, or find someone who knows how to use facilities financial analysis tools such as life cycle costing, net present value, and return on investment. The better financial choice for corrective action may be to replace equipment even when it is not at the end of its service life. In a nutshell, life cycle costing takes into consideration all the costs of doing what you are currently doing and compares them with all of the costs of implementing an alternative in terms of net present value analysis. Implement corrective measures. This could mean setting up or overhauling programs for energy maintenance, operations and maintenance, outsourced servicespretty much the whole gamut of facility management responsibilities. The key here is to not fall to pressure to cut corners and do it right the first time at the right level of service or support that is needed and expected by your internal and external clients. Keep detailed records of what you did, the costs involved, the decision process, and the results. Set up an ongoing program of periodic benchmarking, process improvement, and finetuning results for even greater cost savings and efficiencies. Keep records! Consider setting up a newsletter where you can tell others in your organization about useful information, upcoming events, and your successes. Share your knowledge and insights with others through memberships in IFMA, BOMA, or IREM.

An expert in facilities management and energy efficiency, Richard has experience in commercial, institutional, and governmental facilities. He can be reached at (248)935-9097 or at rbuzard@comcast.net and his LinkedIn profile is at www.linkedin.com/in/richardbuzard.