The challenge to the facility manager is to translate the bottom line into actionable items that meet the facility needs of the organisation and stay in alignment with the organisations commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR).
What is a Facility Condition Assessment?
A facility condition assessment (FCA) is a process that analyses the physical condition of a facility and its equipment. The assessment takes several factors into account including building age, design, assets, materials used, and more. Operations teams should use an FCA as part of a technical investigation to review assets or systems, look into the root causes of deterioration, and as a source for determining a building's replacement value.
In the past, a facility condition assessment was referred to as facilities management audit (FMA or facility management inventory), but this term has subsequently become associated with assets within the building and not the building itself.
Although conducting an FCA can seem like a daunting task, it’s crucial in monitoring your building’s health and performance in the long run. Without a facility condition assessment and accurate building data, budgeting and capital planning will be based on experience and a general guess.
An FCA allows operations teams to arrive at an estimate of reinvestment costs that are defensible with evidence, so a decision can be made to restore, replace or maintain defective assets. It also allows for the use of data and reports to prioritize projects for maintenance, repair or renewal.
FCA decisions are related to sustainability, including financially, environmentally and socially. Some examples are:
Budgets
Facility managers manage two budgets: capital and operational. The capital budget impacts environmental decisions; and environmental priorities can also drive capital expenditures. The energy efficiency of the equipment replaced impacts the amount and type of environmental emissions generated. In some cases, purchasing more efficient or more sustainable equipment can have a higher capital cost. However, the return on investment when considering the long-term impact of the decision can help to make the business case.
Equipment Life
An FCA provides insight about the remaining useful life of equipment. As a result, the life of equipment can be extended through proper repairs at the right time, increasing the time before the equipment reaches its end life. Extending equipment life can have both positive and negative environmental impacts. The positive impact is that the equipment remains in use longer, reducing the need for raw materials to manufacturer a new piece of equipment. The negative impact of having the equipment remain in use longer is the equipment is likely less efficient than new equipment that will eventually replace the current piece of equipment. Given that most equipment today when retired can be recycled, in most cases the environmental benefit of keeping the equipment in operation for as long as possible is likely the most economical and environmentally sound decision.
Energy Consumption
FCAs identify equipment deficiencies. As a result, energy efficient equipment operation can be identified. When a facility has a lot of deficiencies, energy consumption is likely to be higher than necessary. Although an FCA is not an energy audit, an FCA identifies repair and replacement needs, and is based on expected service life and how well a piece of equipment is being maintained. When equipment is maintained at proper intervals, it will be more energy efficient.
Social – Doing the right thing
Social impacts can include the intangible factors of doing the right thing from a balanced environmental and economic perspective. A facility management organisation using a FCA as a sustainability assessment tool will consider the bigger picture, such as the items discussed above, when making decisions about when to replace equipment and with what equipment to replace. In contrast, an organisation only committed to cost reduction may consider only the impact of the budget when making equipment replacement decisions.
Social - Continued Customer Satisfaction
When equipment is operating efficiency, customers are unlikely to take concern with being too warm or too cold or equipment not meeting mission critical needs. An FCA can help facilitate continued customer satisfaction because the facility management team has budgeted financial resources to make sure equipment continues to operate reliably.
Social - Improved Work Environment
FCAs can identify recommendations that support better work environments, specifically improved occupant comfort. Example includes less draft from diffusers from proper operation of HVAC systems and less glare and/or shadows from properly operating lights.
The importance of preventative maintenance
An FCA helps you keep your assets in a good state of repair, reducing the likelihood of their breakdown, and you ultimately have less downtime throughout the life of the asset. A detailed FCA helps you focus your preventive maintenance where it’s most needed, by identifying the exact health status of all your assets. Moreover, an FCA helps you make more economical use of maintenance workers due to working on a scheduled basis instead of a crash basis to repair breakdowns. The overtime costs are reduced, too.
Net-zero target
The researchers are clear: To avoid the worst climate effects, the carbon emissions will need to drop by half by 2030, and reach net-zero around 2050. A number of countries are committed to moving to a net-zero emissions economy. This is in response to climate science showing that in order to control climate change, carbon emissions have to stop; just reducing them is not enough. A Building Condition Assessment helps with the required inputs to make energy-efficient changes, and achieve net-zero targets by gradually reducing carbon footprint in your facility.
To conclude, here are the key points
Facility Condition Assessment (FCA) helps you secure the right funding and take facility-related actions based on accurate priorities, keeping your buildings in a good state of repair.
Before conducting the FCA, the consulting team of the engineers should be made clear about the full scope of the project. It’s the responsibility of the facility managers to give the team a fair understanding of what data to survey and collect, and how to prioritise and categorize the project needs.
A Facility Condition Assessment (FCA) software simplifies and streamlines the whole work process and improves consistency and efficiency within the facility teams.
Once an FCA is finished, corrective actions should be taken based on the findings within a set time period after the assessment is complete.
Building management professionals need to make scientific and data-driven decisions about their buildings to ensure that the budgeting stays in line with the projections.
The roadmap to net-zero has four important steps – Energy efficiency, Advanced heat recovery, On-site renewable energy, net-zero assessment report.
Though conducting an FCA might seem like a challenging task, it’s absolutely essential in monitoring your building’s well-being and keeping it in a good state of repair.
As you can see from this article, an excellent facilities manager has a lot to contend with. Commercial awareness is paramount especially when considering the points above. Awareness of social and environment expenditure is high on the agenda and not everyone fits this profile. Although people like this are few and far between, we are certainly aware of them. We wouldn’t be working with the clients we are if we couldn’t raise the bar and recruit the very best.
Moorcroft have worked with some of the biggest companies in the FM sector. We don’t just want to work with you, we want to understand your culture, your ambition and what kind of people fit your company. How do we do this? Well, we talk to real people and build real relationships. Technology is vital to all our work. However, it is no substitute for picking up the phone. This is what we do and our skill lies in identifying the right people – we pride ourselves on it! We have a proven track record and we strive to work with the best people for each project.
If you have a recruitment requirement, please contact Simon Moorcroft in the first instance.
Email: simon@moorcroftconsulting.com
Website: www.moorcroftconsulting.com
Twitter: @MoorcroftRec
