Breaking Down Silos for Better Outcomes: The Power of Integrative Facilities Portfolio Management

Facilities portfolio management has historically functioned within isolated silos, and this separation has often resulted in decreased efficiency, decreased revenue, and overlooked opportunities for improvement.  

This fragmented state can significantly affect organizations worldwide. For this reason, it's important to understand traditional methods and how facilities portfolio management best practices can make a difference.

What Are Traditional Methods of Facilities Portfolio Management?

A traditional, siloed approach to facilities portfolio management involves having multiple, independently operating parts within an organization. Because these parts function separately, it's easy for miscommunication to occur. This lack of synchronization also tends to result in conflicting information from various departments and disunity.

Unfortunately, with all the distinct identifiers each group contains, merging the data into one consolidated, central oversight organization can be extremely challenging. To make matters even worse, each department may have different conditions or statuses on assets, which can make the process extremely time-consuming, inefficient, and costly.

Rather than continuing on this path, it makes more sense to implement an integrated facilities management approach.

What Is Integrated Facility Management?

Integrated facilities portfolio management allows organizations to seamlessly combine multiple sets of data into one. It takes a more "single source of truth" stance, where all pertinent data is housed in one centralized repository year-round. This method ensures that answers are consistent and readily available for those in need.

It can also significantly reduce the time and effort needed to consolidate data. Integrated facilities portfolio management allows all facilities portfolio management operations to be addressed simultaneously and gives organizations the ability to identify interdependencies between people, processes, and assets to reduce the program's overall costs and streamline workflows.

3 Important Facilities Management Best Practices

When organizations attempt to integrate a facilities portfolio management approach into their processes, there are often challenges related to segregated operations that must be overcome. Fortunately, several practices can help ensure each organization utilizes facilities portfolio management best practices.

Examples of the most important integrated facilities portfolio management best practices include:

1. Establishing a common language.

One of the leading problems associated with siloed facilities management is the use of different terms and identifiers. For this reason, it's vital for organizations to establish a common language.

Using the same key terms and identifiers across the organization can help reduce or eliminate inconsistent values and terminology while ensuring efficient integration. Developing a common language also involves creating unique identifiers for assets that can be used across all information systems, which helps reduce the number of duplicates that result from data consolidation.

To effectively streamline integration across departmental operations within an organization, it's important to conduct strategic meetings to identify and standardize key terminology. This process entails gathering representatives from each department to define crucial terms and discuss the specific data attributes, domain values, and terminology necessary for a unified facilities management approach. Through this collaborative effort, the organization can significantly minimize inconsistencies and duplication, enhancing the efficiency and coherence of facilities portfolio management.

2. Standardizing assessments for data maintenance.

One of the most effective ways to ensure success when consolidating data is to commit to maintaining its usefulness and relevance. To that end, organizations must take a standardized approach to assessments and data maintenance. This can be partially accomplished by keeping data in an electronic format, which helps streamline data consolidation and prevent quality degradation.

A more concrete strategy includes setting a routine to assess a specific percentage of facilities and assets each year, ensuring the data stays current and precise. Establishing a standardized procedure for data assessment is crucial, as is utilizing consistent tools or forms to maintain uniformity in your inventory assessments across all datasets. Equally important is the consistent training of personnel conducting these evaluations to ensure uniformity and accuracy in data gathering and analysis. This structured approach to standardizing assessments and data maintenance lays a solid foundation for maintaining the integrity and usefulness of data throughout the consolidation process.

3. Ensuring credibility and accuracy.

It's critical to ensure validity and accuracy at every step. Ensuring collected, utilized, and consolidated data is both accurate and credible is invaluable when it comes to its adoption. Furthermore, establishing credibility policies and procedures that require verification processes and rigorous quality control measures can help make certain that the data used in the integrated facilities portfolio management approach is reliable and trustworthy.

A multifaceted approach is needed to ensure data maintains its credibility and accuracy. Start by placing data in environments that facilitate easy validation, directly linking timeliness with credibility. It's important to define valid criteria or business rules for every data element, whether for inventory or assessment, to clearly establish what constitutes accurate and credible data. Applying these business rules throughout the process ensures that the data undergoes consistent checks for validity and consistency.

Additionally, providing results from systems recognized for reliability further enhances data credibility. Ensuring the entire process is auditable allows for transparency, allowing stakeholders to review the data's evolution and affirm its integrity from the initial collection to the final analysis. This comprehensive strategy safeguards the data's accuracy and trustworthiness, which are vital for effective facilities portfolio management.

Ready to Explore the Path to Integration with R&K Solutions?  

By breaking down silos and embracing an integrated facilities portfolio management approach, businesses can establish more efficient consolidation practices. Additionally, by using advanced analysis, they can help prevent unforeseen events and practice better financial management while ensuring that supportive data is available throughout the entire process to enable better decision-making.

These key best practices can allow organizations to receive all the benefits of integrated facilities management while addressing inconsistencies in common terminology, standardizing data maintenance, and ensuring that the data collected is credible and accurate.    

Shifting toward a more integrated approach improves efficiency and helps build a solid foundation for a more agile, responsive, and revenue-generating future within facilities management.  

To learn how R&K Solutions can assist with your organization's integrated facilities portfolio management, contact us today.

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