The Auditor: Every FM's friend

Alan Millin
[More Images]

Alan Millin (MSc. CEng FIHEEM) investigates the role of the auditor in the FM process. This is often a dreaded visit, but can only enhance the effectiveness of the overall service offering to clients, he argues.

We often hear groans when it’s time for the auditors to pay us a visit. Whether it’s a financial or ISO system audit, the auditors are often viewed as an inconvenience; busybodies who should mind their own business; social outcasts; hostile invaders sent in to disrupt your business.

But aren’t we, as facilities management professionals, also auditors? Part of our scope often includes tasks like post-occupancy evaluations, an auditing process that provides valuable information about, amongst other things, the effectiveness of our FM consultancy missions. We take the results, analyse them, and act in accordance so as to ultimately improve the facilities for our clients and customers.

On the operational front, we are always looking to reduce energy and utility consumption. A technician may propose that, by simply altering an equipment operating schedule, we can reduce operating costs. Or, perhaps, by installing low-flow fittings, we can reduce water consumption. We will find this type of scenario almost on a daily basis, provided we have created and communicated a process for our operations staff to use, and that they are comfortable using it. They also need to be assured that suggesting new ways of working, even if we later demonstrate that their ideas are not beneficial, is a good thing, and that their managers truly appreciate their initiatives. Do you reward your team for making suggestions?

But we can do much better than this. As we are always looking at ways to reduce energy consumption, why not add a little structure to the way we work and initiate an energy audit? Instead of the occasional idea that may or may not work, why not work methodically through our facilities? We don’t have to be certified auditors or certified energy managers to make significant savings; we just need to want to succeed, and the best way to ensure success is by structuring our activities.

Advertisement

FEATURED COMMENT Please click here to comment on this article

There are plenty of resources available to help us in our quest. Books are available that can guide us in our audits. Energy-saving measures are often categorised by ease of implementation related to financial rewards. We may, for example, find an energy-saving measure that is very cheap to implement that pays handsome dividends, while other measures may cost a lot to implement yet yield only marginal savings. Clearly we can target our efforts to get maximum return for minimum input by using these resources. Templates are available to aid us in recording our findings and then documenting the results of our efforts. These tools simplify the reporting of our successes and support our efforts to quantify our savings in financial terms. Our financial successes can be used not only for our company or clients’ benefit. How would your CV look with highlights like: ‘Reduced operating expenditure by US$ xx million per annum’?

A Building Services Condition Survey, a process designed to assess the condition of plant and installations, is essentially an audit process to enable us to compare the data we gather to a pre-determined standard. As facilities managers, we can do this automatically as part of our contracts, but we can also use it as part of a transition process. You would like to know what you were letting yourself in for when taking over from a competitor, now wouldn’t you?

The operational audit is another tool at our disposal. We can use this to assess whether our operations are producing the expected results. Again, resources are readily available for us; we do not have to devote our valuable time to starting again from scratch. Guidelines are available, as are useful tools to help us implement our audits thoroughly and successfully.

And how safe are our operations? We put systems and processes in place to support our goals. We train our staff in health and safety requirements. But how do we know whether our staff are complying with our policies? Simple; we audit and feed the results back into our system to drive continuous improvement.

Reducing water consumption requires a regular audit process too. This may be as simple as recording the results of daily checks for leaks at fittings, followed by prompt corrective action if needed. Recording water-meter readings as frequently as possible to identify sudden increases in consumption can be a valuable tool in preventing the waste of this valuable resource.

Auditing can also provide us with valuable information to support our expenditure planning and productivity enhancements etc. in addition to helping us improve our customer service.

So being an auditor is yet another skill for the Facilities Manager. We need to know what is happening, whether it meets with our requirements, and what we need to do to improve the current situation.

So the next time an auditor comes in to audit your activities, be sure to smile. He or she is only doing the same thing you do.

---