When you were 8 years old and had a month’s worth of allowance saved up from completing all your chores, did you have a hard time figuring out how to spend it? You may have found yourself in a toy or candy store having difficulty deciding, but it did not take longer than your parents had patience.
You can argue that this was a simpler time, but it was easier to make those decisions because of the limited amount of decisions to make. Now facility managers find themselves with millions of square feet of buildings, a limited budget, and multiple mandates to fulfill, some of them unfunded.
Facility managers commonly agree that better methods exist to manage capital expenditures to maintain facilities; however, those systems and tools cost money. The start to a successful capital planning tool is a facility assessment. Its importance cannot be overstated as it establishes a database and a starting point to identify an entire portfolio and its current condition.
In the past, facility assessments have been conducted by individuals canvassing a building or group of buildings and recording notes on paper. After a week of observations, these field notes are recorded in reports. One obvious downside to conducting facility assessments this way is that…Read the rest of this article in the Ingenuity Magazine.