The world’s most progressive companies see their buildings as more than just bricks and mortar. With proper planning and management, properties can be transformed into strategic assets that play a major part in supporting business goals, workforce culture, talent retention and corporate strategy.
In their white paper on Strategic Facilities Planning (SFP), IFMA states: “Linking facilities to core business strategies is one of the imperatives of refined facility management now and in the future. Even greater importance will be given to SFP in coming years as budgets continue to be squeezed and worker performance and productivity are key factors in the knowledge age.”
Although strategic facilities planning can yield significant benefits, making workplaces fit a company’s business goals can be an overwhelming challenge for corporate real estate groups. Not only must they carve out time for facilities planning from busy workloads, but in many cases they lack the tools to handle the task effectively.
Here’s how to take control of strategic facilities planning so you can proactively support your company’s long-term vision and strategic goals.
How facilities planning can support strategic business goals
Corporate real estate teams typically spend much of their time fulfilling operational requests for new space and managing moves. Yet the value of thinking strategically beyond day-to-day facilities planning tasks can be huge. Here are a few examples:
Planning for lease expiry. When an expensive lease is due to expire, property teams must decide whether to renew that option, consolidate and exit the space, or move to a new space. Making the right call can mean millions in cost savings.
Planning for business structure changes. Today’s business environment is more challenging than ever for property teams, with growth, consolidation, mergers, acquisitions, seasonal projects and reorgs happening on a regular basis. Being ready to support this rapidly changing environment takes strategic thinking and creating workplaces that are poised to turn on a dime.
Planning to support an innovative culture. In this age of information, ideas have become the most valuable commodity, and those tend to come from collaboration. Workplaces can support collaboration between teams by co-locating groups that can benefit from working together, and by creating spaces that encourage better group dynamics.
Planning for a move to modern work environments. The savings to be gained from modern shared workplaces without assigned seating can be enormous. But there are challenges involved in planning for these environments, including educating staff and gaining support for a new way of working, and getting the design right to ensure success.
According to IFMA, at the core of these decisions are two essential questions: Where are we? Where do we want to be? To answer these questions and take the appropriate action, the real estate group not only needs to be plugged into the company’s strategic goals, but they need the right tools to execute facilities planning across the entire portfolio.
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IWMS systems lack support for strategic scenario planning
IWMS systems, the software typically relied upon to handle all the facilities needs of a corporation, are poorly equipped for strategic facilities planning on a global scale.
Most of these systems evolved from tools designed to manage leases and physical plant operations. As a result, their space management efforts were geared towards operational management (basic architectural drawing management and MAC capabilities), so they lack modern space planning features.
If any scenario planning tools are provided, they typically support only small or simple moves. Or the tools are not integrated, requiring time-consuming manual work.
These deficiencies are severely limiting when right-sizing across a city or country, or doing post-acquisition consolidation.
So when you need to do facilities planning globally or even regionally, you’re stuck doing it manually. For IWMS users, that means strategic planning takes far too long.
Here’s what the typical scenario planning process looks like using IWMS:
If you need to look at multiple locations, you would have to download data from your IWMS and put it into spreadsheets. Then you must manipulate all of the data and perform analysis manually. After that painstaking effort, you need to decide on a strategy, then upload it back into the system. Don’t forget that you’ll also need to generate reports manually, as well as creating future stack plans.
What if you want to evaluate multiple scenarios? That takes even more time and effort to do.
Here’s the real clincher: the minute you’ve downloaded your data from the system, it becomes out of date. If someone moves while you’re doing all your manual data manipulation and performing facilities planning offline, you’ll be forced to revise those plans to accommodate everything that’s changed in the meantime.
Sound familiar? It’s no wonder that true strategic facilities planning gets neglected when you’re relying on an IWMS system. That’s why many companies are turning to best-in-class tools that can provide faster automated scenario planning capabilities.
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What if you had robust and flexible business intelligence that identified areas for improvement across your portfolio? How much more could you accomplish with visual tools that allow you to model future changes? Even evaluate multiple facilities planning scenarios with accurate real-time data, taking utilization and ratio seating into account? AND you could do all that in minutes as opposed to days or even weeks? That’s what is available today with modern space planning tools.
Why IWMS can’t keep up with best-in-class space planning tools
There are a number of reasons why IWMS systems lag behind modern space planning tools when it comes to strategic facilities planning features.
Legacy IWMS platforms that have been around for decades are built on old technology. Today’s facilities planning tasks require integration with data from HR systems, Finance systems as well as utilization measurement technologies such as sensors and badge swipe systems. It’s much more difficult to build this integration into these older systems, as opposed to modern technology designed to work seamlessly with other technology.
IWMS vendors must spread their development resources over the full expanse of IWMS operations, which means they can’t evolve feature sets as quickly as best-in-class tools with a focus on space planning. Another caveat to be aware of: with the recent changes to FASB lease accounting rules, IWMS vendors will likely focus a large proportion of development effort in this area in the near future, with very little bandwidth left to add or enhance facilities planning features.
What if you can’t scrap your IWMS?
With years of effort and considerable money invested in implementing an IWMS, replacing it entirely might be out of the question. Luckily, you don’t have to in order to upgrade to better facilities planning features.
Modern space planning tools are designed to easily integrate with other systems. That means you can implement a best-in-class space planning tool that offers the strategic facilities planning features you need and works with the data in your current IWMS system.
Here are some of the key features to look for:
Ease of use. You’ve probably heard the old adage, “garbage in, garbage out.” When a space planning system is difficult to use or requires specialized skills, people don’t use it. It doesn’t take long for the data to become obsolete and inaccurate.
Customizable reports and analytics. Along with reliable data, you need customizable reports to pinpoint opportunities for change. Look for a system that lets you customize what you need easily and at no extra charge.
Visual scenario planning on a global scale. Replace time-consuming number crunching with a visual tool that lets you model multiple new scenarios across your portfolio in minutes.
Fast implementation. The sooner you get back in control and start doing strategic facilities planning, the sooner you can reap the rewards for your bottom line and your company’s future. In some cases, cloud-based facilities planning tools can be up and providing value in a matter of months.
Here’s a useful resource to help you focus your search on the facilities planning capabilities that will provide the most value for your company: 5 Critical Comparison Points for Workplace Management Software.
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