By: Jason Cesare, Chief Financial Officer
CFOs across all business verticals—from healthcare and education to retail and manufacturing—are feeling the pressure to cut costs and slash budgets. Reducing costs is difficult enough, but doing so without sacrificing the quality of your products and services adds another layer of complexity to an already complicated task.
When it comes to facilities management (FM), the biggest challenge facing senior leadership and facilities managers is to trim money from the budget while still achieving critical KPIs. Depending on your specific line of business or company priorities, your KPIs may be more focused around asset management, for example, while others emphasize customer service or cost per square foot. Whatever your focus is, the goal remains the same: to preserve productivity and boost the bottom line.
Here are a few cost reduction strategies for CFOs charged with walking that fine line between savings and output:
Assess Your Biggest Costs
One way to determine how you can curtail spend is by first identifying your company’s biggest FM costs. Labor is often the largest FM expense, yet most CFOs like to avoid cutting jobs to save a few bucks. Rather than reduce personnel, put measures in place that will improve the productivity and efficiency of existing staff.
When a facilities professional is completing a work order, for instance, a large chunk of time is spent researching the problem—technicians will often need to know:
- What is the source of the problem?
- Where is the problem located, and how do I access the asset?
- Has this issue occurred in the past, and if so, when?
- Is the asset covered under warranty?
If all of this asset data is housed within a single FM platform that everyone—from the CFO to the facilities team—can retrieve, you can cut significant time out of the labor process. As a result, your FM team will be able to complete work orders more efficiently while wasting less time, money and resources.
Collect Data and Put It to Work
Investing in an end-to-end FM solution is one of the most effective ways to get the most out of your data. Beyond basic asset data, an advanced FM platform will allow you to monitor trends and costs per site, drilling down into different geographic regions and stores, filtering by season, work order type and more. When you have a better understanding of where your FM spend is going, you’ll be better equipped to make cost-cutting adjustments.
Analyze, Rinse, Repeat
Running analytics based on real-time data is a surefire way to grasp the nuances of your FM spend. Analyzing historical expenditures will also allow you to craft upcoming budgets and make informed decisions based on previous figures. Similarly, predictive analytics will point to trends related to equipment and work orders, which can tell you a lot about where you’ll need to allocate funds and where you can cut them.
As the CFO, you’ll be the most familiar with your business’s financial needs, but it’s your FM team that will have insight into your physical assets and work orders. By combining forces and integrating various streams of data under one platform, you’ll get a birds-eye view of your FM operations and costs.
To learn more about Financial Consulting as part of the NEST Integrated Facilities Management solution, click here.
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