Unlocking Facility Performance: The Six Steps to Successful Benchmarking

Facility benchmarking can be essential for improving facility management and reducing costs. At EMC, we believe six critical steps in the benchmarking process can help organisations achieve their objectives and derive maximum value from their benchmarking efforts.

1. Establish Objectives: This step involves clarifying your goals through benchmarking. It includes identifying the topics of interest, metrics to be evaluated, and the type and extent of benchmarking.
2. Collect and Normalise Data: This step involves assembling the data to be benchmarked, normalizing it to ensure consistency with agreed data definitions, and entering it into an Excel template or a series of online screens organised by topic.
3. Compare with a Target/Peer Group: In this step, EMC analyses the survey data submitted and publishes comparison reports with the results. Participants can see where they stand in all areas they submitted data.
4. Identify Apparent Best Practices: The real value in benchmarking is understanding how other organisations do similar jobs for less cost, better performance, or both. EMC metrics are used to identify organisations/sites with the best apparent performance, and then a discussion is required to confirm it is not the result of “underperformance.” The Best Practices meetings provide a forum for discussing the practices and lessons learned in implementing them.
5. Select Changes To Implement: Based on what you have learned about practices that have benefited others, you can select those that meet your objectives, provide significant improvement opportunities, and fit your organisation’s culture for implementation at your own organisation.
6. Track Progress and Repeat the Cycle: After implementing changes in your operations, monitoring costs and occupant satisfaction is essential. This will tell you whether these changes are successful or require adjustment. Re-benchmarking can help measure progress and build on prior results.

Facility benchmarking can be facilitated through different programs with varying levels of services. For example, at EMC, our benchmarking programs provide a combination of self-service with technical support that makes it affordable, letting you use it as part of your ongoing facility metrics and deciding when and where more intensive effort is warranted.

Our facility benchmarking programs are designed to help you get the most out of your benchmarking efforts. We work to streamline and support you throughout the process by updating our programs for changing needs, simplifying data collection, providing easy data comparisons, identifying emerging practices, supporting action plan development, and reporting progress trends.

By following these key steps and utilising our facility benchmarking programs, you can achieve your objectives and continuously improve your facility management practices.