Facilities Management Essay free essay sample

Discuss the process and considerations that a new business would need to deal with in relation to facilities planning ‘Facilities Management is all about collecting and interpreting data on diverse facets of property use. ‘ -Facilities Management. An explanation. Alan Park 1998. A principle objective for any new business would be to manage the property and contents as efficiently as possible. It is important to maximise the usage of the building whilst minimising wasted space and inefficient departmental interfaces. The facilities manager must consider the bottom line cost as the over-riding important factor when beginning the process of designing or choosing the business premises. I will go on to identify the supporting considerations which underpin the facility manager’s planning. Facilities planning is a multi-stage process in which all areas of the business are covered and this is the stage in which weaknesses can be identified in order to try and avoid mishaps and an unsuccessful property. We will write a custom essay sample on Facilities Management Essay or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Firstly, it is important to choose the location of the property and determine whether it will have to be a newly constructed site, or if renovating an existing building would be the better option. Secondly, the facilities manager must define the facility requirements, design and undertake a cost estimate. The third factor of the process includes a final design review, approval, and freezing the design at the end of that stage. Phase four is the project bid where the building comes under construction and is modified suitably for the purpose of that business. Phase five concludes the process through project management which oversees building construction, equipment installation and commissioning and any project follow-up work. There is a myriad of considerations when undertaking facilities planning, however, I have chosen to concentrate on some of the more important generic factors. Under health and safety regulations the facilities manager will need to record suitable and sufficient risk assessments with the intention of identifying the actions needed to comply with statutory requirements. For example, specific regulations cover such aspects as manual handling operations, display screen equipment use, personal protective equipment and working at height. The facilities manager will need to ensure that all employees understand the safety requirements for their activities within the workplace. Following the risk assessments, a health and safety policy needs to be provided which is freely available and easily understood by the employees. In short, the facilities manager must understand the safe and proper functioning of the premises and equipment through controlling the program of internal safety audits. Associated with risk assessments is the need for strategic planning. The facilities manager needs to understand his role in the organisations business continuity planning. Specifically he will need to understand the four stage process of prevention, preparedness, reaction and recovery in terms of maintaining or assuring facilities to support the business need. Of particular importance would be recovery and backup systems following any catastrophic event. Another consideration is service provision, whether or not to contract out services, or retain ‘in house’. There are various options available and this has to be a careful and thorough consideration if value for money (VFM) is to be maximised. The facilities manager will define the service requirements and concentrate on those attributes which are most important for his particular business. He will consider customer service, flexibility and speed of response, management implications, control and all costs as the important service provision attributes. The facilities manager will wish to constantly improve the use of the building and facilities through adopting appropriate quality assurance schemes, in order to supply services and products to the correct quality and to be able to ensure that all requirements are met. Services and products need to match the facilities manager’s expectations in terms of accuracy, durability, serviceability and ease of operation. Importantly, correct quality does not necessarily mean best possible quality as that could be wasteful of resources. The choice of quality assurance scheme is an important consideration when planning facilities and business structure. The facilities manager will also need to consider installation and operational services. Such factors as heating and lighting, duct work and ventilation, cable management, telephones and communications and security systems all fall under installation services. The facilities manager will look at all of these services to determine how best to get full use of the facility. Taken together these installation services provide a complex picture of the functionality and operation of a facility but the facilities manager’s goal ill be to achieve acceptable performance in each and every area of the installation. Turning to operational services, the facilities manager will need to service the needs of the workforce in terms of security, catering, creche provision, cleaning and maintenance. Whilst the operational services are an HR responsibility, the effectiveness of the se services do rely upon the facilities manager’s support in providing the infrastructure and underlying services. The final consideration I wish to look at within this assignment is benchmarking. In his desire to seek continual improvement, efficiency and quality, the facilities manager may well wish to measure the performance of his facilities against those in other businesses. A barrier to this approach would be businesses reluctance to share information but facilities managers could provide a cross-fertilisation of ideas on procedures and policy interpretations that could be mutually beneficial to their parent organisations. Therefore, while benchmarking may be difficult to achieve, it is an important consideration when looking at well established facilities management. So far I have looked at the multi-stage process and some of the important facilities planning considerations, throughout the rest of the assignment I will analyse three online journals with a view to highlighting some key aspects of the process and considerations above. Within Mei-yung Leung’s, Xinhong Lu’s and Hon-yan Ip’s article about the facilities management in secondary schools in Hong Kong, they identified six different characteristics of facilities management concluding that ‘it aims to provide end-users with a comfortable, effective and quality environment with minimum resources to enhance organisational effectiveness’. They go on to examine these characteristics in terms of hard facilities (seat allocation, density, noise, temperature etc) and soft management (hygiene services, technical support etc). Their research methodology centred on a questionnaire survey to investigate the level of facilities management satisfaction. Their approach highlighted considerations that I had not seen in other areas of my research and I particularly liked the distinction between hard and soft factors. Additionally their explanations of how temperature affects thermal comfort of human beings provided a great insight into one particular aspect of facilities management considerations. Indeed their findings were consistent with other research on temperature and comfort ‘temperature affects thermal comfort of human beings. However, a room with a slightly cool temperature leads to more effective learning (McAndrew, 1993; Clothier, 1996). ’ I also liked their use of polling within the question set which is a well trusted method of identifying satisfaction with products/services. In their article on the ‘Barriers to the operation of the facilities management’, Pitt and Hinks highlighted structural, strategic, operational and professional barriers to the successful integration of facilities property management. Whilst they argued convincingly about the barriers, their conclusion that effectiveness can be improved by the incorporation of facilities managers into strategy management over-emphasises the importance of facilities management. Whilst I fully accept that facilities management is a key enabler for any business organisation, it is there to support the operation of the business and not to substitute for an operational output. In Liz Clark’s and David Rees’s article, on the role of facilities management within the NHS and local government in England and Wales, they compare the levels of facilities management awareness, the ability of FM managers to influence the decision making process and the delivery of effective facilities management services. They conducted interviews with very senior executives which, while valid, could have produced slightly skewed results (just a top down view). They went on to compare how FM is integrated into the organisational structures and concluded that it was difficult to make direct comparisons on ‘best value’. They also concluded that there is growing evidence within these pubic sectors that FM is ‘not a business opportunity but a key element in ensuring that the public are provided with best-value services’. This leads them to an overall conclusion that FM is a profession within its own right. Several things struck me about their conclusions; firstly, government departments have sufficient resources to devote to effective Facilities management, secondly, government departments will automatically adhere to government policy and would be willing to share best practice (commercial considerations may be a barrier for sharing practice against competitors in the same industry) and thirdly, the public sector is focussed on service as a core component of its business operation. Accordingly I would agree with their assessment that facilities management should be viewed as a profession. The process and considerations that I have looked at within this assignment can not be seen as the definitive set of facilities management factors and I realise that facilities management is a hugely complex business area. For such a fundamental aspect of supporting the business need, the hard and soft factors touched upon above may well be a very useful way of more easily breaking down facilities management considerations.