February 14, 2014—The IFMA Foundation is offering a free how-to guide on its site that is designed to assist facilities management professionals in making informed decisions on benchmarking and achieving benchmarking goals. The paper, entitled Benchmarking for Facility Professionals, was written by Peter Kimmel, an IFMA Fellow and the principal of FM BENCHMARKING, and was reviewed and edited by a team of subject matter experts.
“With the help of organizations like IFMA and the IFMA Foundation, facility management professionals are turning to colleagues for guidance more than ever before,” said IFMA Foundation Executive Director Jeffrey J. Tafel, CAE. “Benchmarking is one of the most valuable ways that individual facility management professionals can benefit from the broad experience and expertise of the larger discipline. The IFMA Foundation is pleased to offer this useful guide for the advancement of the facility management profession free of charge. We have no doubt that readers will appreciate Peter Kimmel’s insights and guidance, and we thank him for his ongoing contributions.”
The guide is designed to help FM professionals gain a stronger understanding of what benchmarking is, how it works, and how to best utilize it for their specific needs.
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As the comprehensive, practical report points out, benchmarking has become a valuable tool for many facilities management professionals seeking data-driven guidance. With the increasing amount of data available to modern FM professionals, benchmarking can provide new insights that were previously out of reach.
The guide is designed to help FM professionals gain a stronger understanding of what benchmarking is, how it works, and how to best utilize it for their specific needs. Included are discussions of multiple approaches to benchmarking to suit varied objectives. The guide differentiates between how facilities managers may apply benchmarking differently from corporate real estate (CRE) executives, and shows how benchmarking can be implemented in manageable phases.
Full of examples, the guide identifies metrics that can be tracked, reports to present the data to others, and how those reports can be filtered to provide “apples-to-apples” comparisons. For those who wish to take benchmarking to a new level, the guide illustrates how to identify which best practices will be most effective for different types of facilities and how this can result in benefits such as reduced operating costs.
“Benchmarking has been a major interest area of FMs for many years,” said Kimmel. “While the concept is familiar to most facilities professionals (loosely, ‘a way to compare one’s metrics to those of others’), the details of what comprises benchmarking have held different meanings by FMs—and all meanings are correct. This guide sheds some light on and provides structure to those perspectives.
“The objective in writing the guide was to find a way to encompass the different ways one can benchmark, show which work best for which types of objectives, and then go into detail on how to implement a benchmarking solution for one’s organization. When applied properly, benchmarking not only will show a facility professional how well a building is doing compared to others, but also how to improve that building’s performance, including reducing operating costs. In today’s economy, cost reduction is more important than it has ever been.”
This report was made possible by the generous support of global outsourcing services provider ISS: “ISS is delighted to sponsor this how-to guide in response to a groundswell of real pressure and momentum for benchmarking solutions in the industry,” said Peter Ankerstjerne, ISS Global Marketing Director. “The potential value of benchmarking to clients and outsourcing providers means that it’s critical to develop effective solutions now.”
Established in 1990 as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation, the IFMA Foundation works for the public good in support of FM higher education, students studying facilities management and related fields, research critical to the profession, and increasing awareness of facilities management among high school students. The IFMA Foundation is supported by the generosity of the FM community, including IFMA members, chapters, councils, corporate sponsors and private contributors.
For more information, see the FM BENCHMARKING Web site as well as its FMLink ad.
