Well, after the massive 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, the responsibilities of facility managers have expanded massively!
“The organizations’ focus for facility managers started crowding more on security, and emergency preparedness”.
Nowadays, Facility managers’ responsibility isn’t just to lessen the facility expenses. But also to help improve productivity, revenue generating capacity, and image of the organizations. Additionally, they are bound to make their office premises, manufacturing facilities, and other concrete properties competitive enough compared to the other companies within the same industry.
Most often, the facility management professionals are demanded to have vast knowledge around various areas.
To examine how well the facility managers and the managements have evolved since 9/11 attack, IFMA had recently conducted a survey across countries.
Here are the 4 key takeaways,
- Due to complex and competitive markets, companies are seeking more specialized services that OSPs can provide.
- Both FMs and OSPs rated their experience of working together as positive to very positive.
- FMs currently spend nearly 30% of their time working with outsourcing companies.
- Most of the FMs say that they can overcome any shortage by outsourcing.
1. To build/maintain energy efficient buildings
Focusing mainly on constructing new energy efficient buildings, the organizations have also begun to enforce green building measures within their existing building operations.
This way they are embracing sustainability into everything, starting from work culture — employee/occupant’s profession.
As well, managers are stating that their purchase decisions are starting to highly rely on lifecycle sustainability.
With known data around increasing energy costs and environmental issues, the facility managers are asked to truncate the organization’ carbon footprint and energy consumption.
2. Regular checks has become their regular life
The daily operation of buildings was then taken over by Campus Facility Managers’ team which involves, technicians, groundskeepers, maintenance engineers along with custodians and volunteers.
By making this practice habitual, the campus facility crew takes care of safe, effective indoor environment with pollution free good air quality and gratifying aesthetics.
To achieve these, the crew commits themselves to sustainability and green cleaning operations and solutions.
Tasks that groundskeepers take care of range from tree trimming, aesthetic field maintenance, grounds equipment maintenance, proper pruning techniques, hardscape maintenance, pest control, and fire prevention.
Regulating the maintenance of all these allows them to achieve facilities excellence in the exterior environment.
Also, facility managers are dominant players not just in making design decisions but also in continuing the innovatory nature of construction on pre-occupied buildings and also undertaking the buildings before occupancy.
3. To take preventive and proactive actions
The facility managers make proactive decisions by two ways. They first assess their prior experiences and knowledge base.
Details about the building, equipment records to know when the machine was first installed, their longevity/expected lifetime, regular maintenance check, and when they last broke down along with the list of equipment whose fix were postponed.
In general, facility managers always have a good idea over immediate future of asset functionality.
The second method to gain precisely understand the needs of a building is by initiating a facilities condition audit.
Few of the facility managers are asked to perform facility checks periodically. When running an audit, facility managers get a thorough exposure to the equipment and systems that are inside the building.
And by the amount of data amassed, the facility managers will be able to figure out the future needs, schedule future projects, and prioritize the projects accordingly.
The facility managers measure their maintenance effectiveness by comparing their building’s maintenance performance score against others.
Precisely, after the 9/11 attack, the responsibilities of facility managers have become vast enough that they play a key role in almost every aspect of any building.
Being given control to handle all the requirements and machines inside the building/industry, and more coming in the proximal future, the facility managers are a deluxe deal nowadays!
