The Next Phase

Budget cuts are hitting education facility administrators hard. In the face of staff reductions, shifting priorities and stalled initiatives, facility managers are charged with identifying efficiency measures and doing “more with less.”

One of your budget cuts may have been a comprehensive, benchmark facility assessment because it represented significant expenditures of time and money. Or, maybe you never budgeted for an assessment. In either case, regressive budget periods are prime times to assess what's broken and what's missing. Now is the time to strategically plan your capital renewal and deferred maintenance (CRDM) correction program for better times and budgets ahead. A condition assessment of physical assets can help accomplish this task.

Can you get facility-condition data in a more strategic way — doing more with less? By conducting the facility assessment in phases, you can get the data you need when you need it, and level your capital and time expenditures into more manageable amounts.

Take a look

A comprehensive facility condition assessment (FCA) provides detailed data to support a capital renewal and deferred-maintenance program. It helps facility administrators identify, estimate and prioritize existing deferred maintenance and predict capital-renewal requirements across their entire real asset portfolios.

Identifying and addressing CRDM issues are critical facility-management activities. Neglect and chronic underfunding of capital renewal and the resulting deferred maintenance threatens the educational mission of many institutions. A minor loss of occupancy resulting from an unfunded deficiency correction can cost an institution thousands of lost staff hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars in emergency work orders.

The amount of data produced in a comprehensive facility assessment is practically unmanageable unless it is captured digitally within a database. Facility-assessment services are available that have incorporated assessment “best practices” and facility bench-marking into sophisticated FCA software. From single-user to multi-user to web-based options, these packages can provide facility administrators with IT tools that can efficiently track standards, functional conditions, deferred maintenance, lifecycle capital renewal issues and anything else that is broken, missing or inadequate within a facility or its infrastructure.