VFA Peer Facilities Benchmarking: Compare Your Property Portfolio to Best Practices

Facilities professionals are often asked to do more with less. Money for repairs often falls down the budget priority list, leading facilities conditions to deteriorate even further. Without a strong, objective argument for increased facilities spending, the cycle tends to repeat year after year.

This goes on until building systems start to break, leading to emergency repairs and questions about how things came to be in such a poor state. That’s why, across industries, deferred maintenance totals are reaching record levels. But how do you know when your level of deferred maintenance is too high?

To build a strong case for increased facilities spending, managers need all the clear, objective data they can get. While centralizing facilities details into a unified capital planning software platform is an important step, it doesn’t provide the full context key stakeholders need to understand how they compare to peers and competitors. Facilities professionals who have objective data about how their facilities compare will have an extra edge when it comes time to prioritize the budget.

“To build a strong case for increased facilities spending, managers need all the clear, objective data they can get.”

Putting Your Facilities Metrics into Context

As a leader in the capital planning field, Gordian manages facilities data for hundreds of organizations across a wide range of industries, including government, education, healthcare and utilities. Using aggregate data, peer benchmarking can help facilities managers understand how their assets and buildings compare to their direct peer group and across industries. More importantly, they also help them understand what comparative differences mean for their portfolio, develop strategies for targeting improvements and build defensible budgets.

How Does Facilities Benchmarking Work?

To utilize peer facilities benchmarking, begin by defining the performance measures that are most critical for your organization in its capital decision-making process and the questions you most want to address, like:

• How does your portfolio’s overall Facility Condition Index (FCI) compare with others in your industry?
• How does your organization’s replacement cost per square foot compare with similar organizations?
• How do the deficiency costs of particular types of buildings, such as hospitals, classrooms, data centers or retail outlets, compare with those of your peers?

Next, establish a peer group that will form the basis for comparing facility metrics, such as FCI or replacement value. Parameters for selecting this peer group may be based on criteria such as industry, asset age, asset type, building system, asset replacement value or other relevant categories.

Based on aggregate data from peers, you can then benchmark your portfolio based on comparative metrics including:

• Facility condition index (FCI).
• Requirement cost per square foot.
• Replacement value per square foot.

With peer facilities benchmarking, you can run reports from within VFA Capital Planning Software whenever they are needed, such as:

• Assets Reports: Compare your portfolio to peers by size, replacement value per square foot and more. Show replacement value by size and age. View data in both graphical and tabular formats.
• Requirements Reports: Compare your portfolio to peer portfolios by requirement cost per square foot, distribution of requirements by action year, requirements by category group and requirements by system group. Information is displayed in a graphical format.

Going Behind the Numbers

Peer facilities benchmarking includes detailed benchmark reports. However, we recognize that no matter how detailed a facilities benchmarking analysis is, the resulting numbers and charts might not tell the whole story. Why might your administrative facilities, for example, average a much higher requirement cost than those of your peers? Which particular systems are driving higher SCI values? Why is the replacement value of your laboratories much lower than average?

To ensure that your team derives the greatest value from the benchmark data, our consultants can provide in-depth analysis of select areas of customer interest. We can also conduct workshops with your team to both present findings and provide insights into their implications for your portfolio and your long-term capital strategy.

Peer Facilities Benchmarking Can Help You

• Objectively justify requests for funding based on industry-wide benchmarks
• Understand how your facilities compare to others and the reason for differences
• Validate that planned investments are appropriately targeted
• Target areas for improvement and track progress toward goals over time

The Gordian Advantage

A leader in facility capital planning, Gordian draws on a wealth of experience in facility assessment methodology as well as a vast repository of facility data managed within our software to develop relevant facilities benchmarks for our clients. Whatever your organization’s industry or region, we can help you understand your strengths and weaknesses relative to your industry peers, target the most appropriate strategies for improvement and measure progress over time.