The Added Value of Facilities Management: Early Involvement of Facilities Management and Benchmarking

Wang Hao
ID: 40101577
Construction & Project Management
School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering
Queen’s University Belfast

Table of Contents
1. Introduction 2
2. Literature Review 3
2.1. Early FM Involvement 3
2.1.1. The benefits of the involvement of FM in the design process 3
2.1.2. The barriers of the involvement of FM in the design process 4
2.2. Benchmarking 4
2.2.1. The benefits of the benchmarking 5
2.2.2. The barriers of the benchmarking 5
3. Further Discussion 6
4. Conclusion 8
5. References 9

The Added Value of Facilities Management: Early Involvement of Facilities Management and Benchmarking
1. Introduction
In the development of the construction, how to achieve the best value in a project has received an increasing attention from the clients and facilities management industry. As building systems become more complex, facilities management professionals really need to be a part of the design process from the outset to develop economically and operationally viable buildings. As well, organisations now place a greater emphasis on life cycle costs because they realize the costs involved in building usage and maintenance will exceed initial capital costs by several times during a building’s entire life cycle.
In addition to the early FM involvement, a reasonable measurement of facilities management performance is also important for the clients and facilities management organisations to achieve the best value of a project. According to the David G. Kincaid (1994), inevitably in considering operational performance in facilities management, a benchmarking to measure against is a first consideration. If applying the benchmarking reasonable, it will lead to better value management of facilities service provision.
Therefore, early FM involvement and benchmarking can be treated as two tools to be applied for the value achievement purpose. The aim of this article is to find benefits and barriers of these two tools and then to verify if they really can add value to the facilities management.
This research is based on the literature review to explore the previous studies and analysis the benefits and barriers of these two methods. After literature review, there will be a section to discuss whether clients and facilities management organisations can achieve better value through these two methods.
Because of the time and the space limitation, this article can only summarize some main points. However, this research can change the attitude of the clients to rethink the importance of early FM involvement and benchmarking and to pay more attention to the entire life cycle of a project.
2. Literature Review
2.1. Early FM Involvement
According to the Meng’s lecture on 10th February 2014, generally, the design stage is separated from construction, operation, maintenance and service provision, which leads to the lack of constructability, operability, maintainability and serviceability for the designed facilities. To understand facilities management, there is a need to examine the interface with built environment, design and construction. Understanding where facilities management impacts on the design and construction process; how the use of facilities management during the design process can gain saving in cost and time and less failure in constructed facilities (Enoma, 2005). To answer these questions, it is necessary to explore the benefits and barriers of the early FM involvement.
2.1.1. The benefits of the involvement of FM in the design process
According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), most projects can be influenced easily during the early phase, while, the cost for this influence during the same phase is much lower (Project Management institute, 2008). Because of this, Mosey (2009) thought that there will be a lot of opportunities to improve an overall performance of a project including the