LEAN Facilities Management Roadmap

A LEAN Facilities Management Roadmap can help any committed organization maximize value from its built environment.

What is a LEAN Facilities Management Roadmap?

A LEAN Facilities Management Roadmap (LeanFMR) is document that outlines the plan to achieve short and long-term goals for facilities leveraging total cost-of-ownership life-cycle asset management and collaborative, relationship-based LEAN, construction delivery methods that leverage system-thinking.

LEAN Facilities Management Roadmap

 

A LeanFMR provides essential information that helps organizations make better decisions about facilities reinvestment.

Strategic Asset Management Key Principles

Step-by-step plan

A LeanFMR shows the currently status of facilities and other built structures in terms of physical and functional condition, as well associated costs required to maintain these assets at a desired level.   It shows capital requirements as well as which improvements are planned over time, including end of life.

Multiple knowledge domains, technologies, information sources, as well as internal and external stakeholders are integrated to assure that physical infrastructure requirements are planned and executed in an organized, cost-efficient, and timely manner.

Ultimately, the goal of a LeanFMR is to align key owners participants and stakeholders and service providers,  by creating an action plan to implement new relationship-based solutions within a common data environment (CDE).    A CDE is a critical component as it  helps teams to better understand what technical requirements are needed to achieve the final goal, as well as detailed costs, and provides a clear path for program success.  An example of a CDE that provides financial transparency is a locally researched detailed line item unit price book (UPB).  A properly designed UPB, such as the 4BT OpenJOC(TM) Unit Price Book,  is locally researched, uses common terms and definitions in plain English that all parties can easily understand, and provided renovation, repair, and new construction tasks with supporting labor, material, and equipment costs as well as productivity information.  While so called “national average price books” and “square foot” or “assemble level” information have value, granular local market line time data is actionable and provide for the best mutual understanding of scope of work, thereby minimizing errors, omissions, and miscommunications.

LEAN FACILITIES MANAGEMENT

All facilities real property owners must be able to understand detailed line items construction cost estimating, or have a properly vetted owner’s representative to provide this capability.

Core Components of a LEAN Facilities Management Roadmap are:

Goals

Short and long-term performance requirements for the built environment in terms of cost, physical condition, and functional condition are quantitatively specified, including associated timelines and budgets.  Goals are outcome oriented and focus upon core aspects of the organizational mission.

Implementation Plans

Implementation plans are phased to enable requisite “change management” to occur at a pace at which the organization is capable.   Not all organization are ready for the day-to-day behaviors and activities required within a LEAN process-based environment.  Establishing specific milestones and/or  key achievements and tracking them helps participants understand the progress and direction of the long-term goal of the entire program.  Milestones are typically tagged on specific dates and treated as performance targets to ensure that the organization is on track.

Knowledge & Management Resources, Education & Training

Another core aspect of the implementation plan is initial and ongoing training and communication with all internal and external participants and stakeholders.

The internal and external teams needed to implement and maintain the LeanFMR is not a trivial consideration.  New processes and capabilities are needed.    The level of information sharing, contribution is significantly higher within a LEAN environment. Dependencies between multiple groups are much higher.

It is not unusual that reorganization must take place in order to get the right employee and/or right service partner in the right place. Initial development and implementation can carry a higher initial cost that has to be budgeted, however, reap significant measurable savings.

Fortunately, multi-level (introductory, advanced, refresher) and multi-format (on-site, virtual, self-paced) training in relationship and information based process as well as requisite tools, information databases, and support are readily available.

Who is involved in drafting the LEAN / Relationship-based Facilities Management Roadmap and Execution?

Virtually all owner areas (leadership, planning, procurement, and project delivery) are involved in facilities int the process, as well as service providers.

  • Senior management
  • Planners
  • Procurement
  • Facilities management
  • Service providers (Builders, AEs …)
  • Operations
  • Building Users
  • Legal

The creation and execution of a LeanFMR is not static,

A continuous effort is needed to identify key initiatives that support the needs of the organization, engage people, and effect planning, execution and continuous improvement and ensure stakeholders remain focused on the most important organizational objectives.

Focus must be upon the achievement of best value outcomes in support of the organizational mission.   The team must also account for possible risk factors, and possible obstacles and prepare accordingly.

Key Elements and Requirements

  1. Focus upon BEST VALUE outcomes
  2. Common Data Environment (CDE)
  3. Financial Transparency
  4. Mandatory Collaboration (Both internally and with external service providers)
  5. Required Initial and Ongoing Training for all participants
  6. LEAN Construction Delivery Methods
  7. Shared Risk/Rewards
  8. Mutual Respect/Trust
  9. Ongoing improvement
  10. Enabling Technology

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