The Strategic Facilities Plan Team has identified ways to help TVA reduce costs by more than $26 million over the next five years. “Our primary objective was to develop a strategy for all TVA facilities throughout the Tennessee Valley,” says Terrell Burkhart, VP of Facilities Management, who led the team that developed the plan.
Members of the core team worked with representatives from each Strategic Business Unit (SBU) to develop a cross-organizational facility strategic plan. For the first time, that plan was aligned with TVA’s business planning. Because of their diverse backgrounds, the members representing the SBU’s provided valuable information on their organizations’ needs for space. A major goal of the Strategic Plan was to divide TVA facilities into two categories—”core” and “non-core.”
A core facility is a building TVA owns or leases that is strategically located and has high operational efficiency in terms of heating, cooling, and maintenance costs. TVA looked at the possibilities of consolidating within those core facilities, increasing efficiency, reducing costs of operations, and maintaining quality. A non-core facility is one TVA leases or owns that is not strategically located and has high operational costs. The objective for these facilities is to move similar TVA businesses out of these non-core facilities. Then TVA could terminate the lease, sublease the property, or sell it.
Two other goals of the Strategic Facility Plan were to centralize facility management functions into one TVA organization and to evaluate, prioritize, schedule, and fund all facilities’ projects from one TVA-wide budget.
The Strategic Facility Plan has led to:
- the reduction of 315,000 square feet of leased, owned, and subleased space.
- a total savings of $12 million from the sale of non-core properties and cost avoidance of ongoing maintenance.
- a 50 percent reduction in ancillary and support space square footage when co-locating TVA organizations.
- the alignment of the real property inventory with TVA enterprise wide strategic goals.
TVA President and Chief Operating Officer Ike Zeringue states that the efforts of the Strategic Facilities Plan Team model the standards required for TVA to compete in a re-regulated marketplace. “The objectives of the plan are very clear and are aligned with TVA’s Critical Success Factors,” Zeringue says. “The plan has formed the basis for us to make business-driven decisions relative to our physical-facility assets.”
For more information, contact Mr. William C. Threlkeld at (865) 632-3497 or via e-mail at wcthrel5@tva.gov.
