November 21, 2008—FMLink, a leading online publication for facilities managers, and Facility Issues, a premiere international FM benchmarking company, have teamed up to create FM BENCHMARKING. An online demo will be available Dec. 15 on the Web site.
FM BENCHMARKING enables building professionals to compare their facilities’ performances to those of others through three critical benchmarking areas: costs, sustainability and best practices. By examining the relationship of all three together, FM BENCHMARKING has opened up major opportunities for building professionals to enhance the operating efficiencies of their facilities while doing more to reduce their buildings’ carbon footprints.
FM BENCHMARKING is available on an annual subscription basis per building through two “surveys”a costs survey and a sustainability survey. Each survey integrates best practices to help building professionals improve their buildings’ performance.
The costs survey encompasses over 90% of facilities’ typical annual operating expenses and focuses on four areas: utilities, maintenance, custodial and security. The sustainability survey focuses on measures used to qualify a building for LEED-EB certification.
By integrating best practices data, one may compare a building’s performance to that of others not only through traditional cost measures, but by seeing which best practices are being followed by others whose buildings perform similarly. Just as important, one will identify which best practices are being followed by those whose buildings are performing better than the subscriber’s building. The value of this to the building professional is much greater than just comparative dataone also will be able to identify which best practices can be done to improve one’s metrics.
To ensure that the comparative data is meaningful, FM BENCHMARKING includes over 30 different filtersets that each subscriber can select as reports are being generated. Examples include the building’s industry (e.g., educational, medical, manufacturing, etc.), building size, climate, location, whether a service is conducted in-house or contracted out, and many more.
A large number of pre-defined reports also are included, so one can evaluate such metrics as area per person, energy consumed per person or per unit area, cost per occupant, and a wide variety of others. Reports are output through a series of graphs and tables, each specific to the selected filterset. Each graph identifies the subscriber’s building and also all other buildings in the filterset. Once a subscriber’s data has been in the system for a period of time, trend reports will be available. Data are automatically converted into one’s unit of choice, so if one is comparing a building in the United States to other buildings around the world, each building is shown in the subscriber’s chosen units.
Through the sustainability survey, subscribers can see how close they are to achieving LEED-EB certification and which best practices others with similar scores are following. For those buildings who are already certified, subscribers will learn which best practices are being followed by the others.
FM BENCHMARKING offers special features for contractors who sell products or services to their clients. Special reports are available so that contractors may compare the performance of their clients; then, by studying the best practices followed by any one client, the contractor can recommend ways to improve that client’s performance. Similarly, by comparing their overall client performance to those of the rest of the FM BENCHMARKING database, contractors will have an excellent basis for assessing the performance of their company as a whole.
Consulting firms can use FM BENCHMARKING as a basis for developing recommendations to their clientsFM BENCHMARKING will identify best practices that can be done by a client, and then the consulting firm can prioritize which should be done and when.
“FM BENCHMARKING offers building professionals their first real opportunity to be able to compare costs, sustainability measures, and best practices,” says Peter Kimmel, principal of FM BENCHMARKING. “By combining these three areas, professionals will be able to evaluate facilities to get much more than comparative data—each will have the tools necessary to save space, money and energy, while at the same time reducing each building’s carbon footprint.”
FM BENCHMARKING already has over 800 million sq. ft. in its database, including space from 468 of the Fortune 500 companies. Based on preliminary interest expected from potential clients, it is expected to add to this number rapidly.
It will be available December 15, 2008 through www.fmbenchmarking.com.
FM BENCHMARKING is being offered at a price-point of starting at under $200 per yeara cost that should easily be saved many times over.
About FMLink
FMLink is a comprehensive, online facilities management publication; it includes over 12,000 pages of news and featured articles, events calendars, recent and pending regulations, magazine articles from many other FM publications, discussion forums, job mart, vendor directories, and much more to support facilities professionals in their jobs. It also includes a very major section on sustainability. FMLink has 75,000 registered online subscribers, and over the past 12 months had over 600,000 unique visitors. Peter Kimmel, AIA, IFMA Fellow, is the publisher of FMLink; he is a former facilities manager with a strong background in automation and research. FMLink offers free access through its Web site.
About Facility Issues
Facility Issues is a leading international benchmarking company with over ten years in the industry. Facility Issues leads industry benchmarking groups such as: Museums and Cultural Institutions, IFMA’s Utility Council, Facility Managers Roundtable, R&D / National Laboratories, Telecommunications, URS, Boeing, Chicago Area FMs, and other benchmarking groups that utilize benchmarking metrics to identify best practices in facilities management. Its principal is Keith McClanahan, PE, RPA. His benchmarking and engineering experience has been an invaluable component of FM BENCHMARKING. For more information, see the Web site.
About LEED
The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System is a feature-oriented rating system that awards buildings points for satisfying specified green building criteria. Certified, Silver, Gold, and Platinum levels of LEED green building certification are awarded based on the total number of points earned within each LEED category. For more information, visit the Web site.
