The 3 Biggest Facility Expenses And How To Handle Them
The article outlines three major facility expenses—lifecycle costs of equipment, unused office space, and flexible workspace management—and advises facility managers to use asset tracking tools to evaluate repair versus replacement costs, implement flexible desk policies like hot desking to reduce wasted space, and leverage desk booking applications to optimize space utilization and reduce overhead.
As a facility manager, running an office space properly can be expensive, and managing the appropriate budget can be overwhelming. The way you handle the biggest expenses can have a significant effect on your bottom line. Investing in the right space management methods can trim costs and ease processes throughout your facility. Here are three of the biggest facility expenses and how you can address them:
Lifecycle Costs
You should always consider the lifecycle costs of equipment when deciding whether to repair or replace them. Estimate how much an asset will cost to maintain this year and in the future, and compare the cost of replacing the asset versus maintaining it over the same period. To do this for all your physical assets, keep a proper inventory.
A resource tracking tool allows you to quickly locate and keep track of company-wide resources, ensuring that everything is accounted for. You can use it to generate and attribute related asset reports that will guide you in determining which assets need to be replaced. Well-maintained equipment can last beyond its expected lifespan, saving your facility valuable funds.
Unused Space
The U.S. has added an astonishing 2 billion square feet of office space over the last 30 years. With today’s increasingly mobile workforce, this has created a tremendous waste of space and resources. To combat this, companies like Deloitte have introduced flexible desk policies such as “hoteling”—a system of reserving a specific workstation in advance for a certain period. A similar concept is hot desking, where employees can book any available workstation for a period of time. These strategies have saved large companies millions of dollars in conserved real estate.
Carefully consider your space’s inventory and the work habits of your employees to determine if hot desking is right for your office. A desk booking application can make the adoption of a flexible workspace easier for facility managers. These tools allow you to measure the adoption rate of the new system before fully committing. If successful, employees can easily find available desks from anywhere and know when they can be used.
Worker Productivity
Time is the most precious asset for a facility manager. It is unreplenishable and must be managed with special regard and careful planning. To understand the true cost of lost productivity, examine how you and your staff spend each minute of the day. Identify tasks and activities that waste time—such as switching desks without an efficient coordination system—and find ways to better allocate time. Doing this can reduce labor costs and increase efficiency through useful software and improved communication.
One major time waster for many facility managers is ineffective organization of work orders, especially when reorganizing a work environment. A request manager can help tremendously by allowing you to fully guide requests from beginning to end. With features like a simple request form, submitting work orders becomes easy, enabling you to create a method that treats employees fairly while maximizing efficiency. Time is money, so investing in these improvements can yield a strong return on your bottom line.
Whether your facility is big or small, there are always ways to save and streamline expenses, especially when you take full advantage of key methods available to you, such as workplace techniques or valuable software systems.
For more insight into making cost-saving moves, see the earlier blog post detailing where your company can save the most money.