22 Building Operating Management/August ’11

COVER STORY

It takes commitment to a vision, in-genious thinking and strategies, talent and doggedness.

You might not think facilities man-agement is an apt arena for these kinds of attributes to flourish, but as the five winners of the 2011 FMXcellence award show, there is no limit to the feats of achievement possible in the field. Best of all, no Spandex required.

The winners are varied in geography and facility type: Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Mich.; PNC Financial Services Group in Scran-ton, Pa.; Hays Consolidated Indepen-dent School District in Buda, Texas; Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in Charlotte, N.C.; and the Department of Central Services, State of Oklahoma government. And yet certain themes bind them. A vision of facilities man-agement as a strategic quantifiable en-

deavor. A resolution that being short on budget doesn’t prevent largesse in in-novation. And decision making driven by sustainability, not as a buzzword or as a PR move, but because it just plain makes sense.

Though the exact parameters of each organization’s projects might not be directly exportable to all facility management departments, their strate-gies for leadership and problem solving certainly are.

Green Means GoBeing green has, begrudgingly by

some, become de rigeur. But by mov-ing beyond a few green touches here and there to adopt a systematic ap-proach, sustainability can rise as a way to showcase true leadership in facilities management and garner benefits for the larger organization.

By NaoMi MillÁN, associate editor

Excellence requires a touch of grace: pro athletes seem to defy the laws of phys-

ics, artists breathe into life the sublime, scientists are able to see beyond to

what is possible.

Building Operating Management/August ’11 23

24 Building Operating Management/August ’11

Take what occurred in the State of Oklahoma government’s Department of Central Services (DCS), office of fa-cilities management. In response to a constrained budget and rising energy costs, several years ago the facility

management department instituted a sustainability plan. This plan was meant to be a department initiative but was so well-received it was rolled out to the entire agency. It touches everything they do.

“The sustainability plan is anything from how we purchase motors to how we purchase chemicals,” says Craig Cherry, facilities operations manager, DCS. “It is the roadmap for everything we do now.” And what they’re finding is that decisions driven by the sustain-ability plan end up being the right thing to do long-term for the good of the or-ganization.

As an example he points to a boiler replacement. The 55-year-old boilers were still hanging on, but were ineffi-cient and were getting harder to certify. Once it became crucial to replace the boilers, they decided to go with highly efficient condensing boilers. Though they had to pay more upfront than for a direct replacement, operation and gas usage are much better now than they’ve ever been. “We looked at the long-term effect, and we do that on everything now,” Cherry says. “It’s not just what’s the best price. We’re looking at lifetime usage and what’s the best benefit we’re

going to get.”Making sustainability and energy

efficiency the frames in which deci-sions are considered has yielded more immediate benefits. From fiscal year 2008, when the office of facilities man-agement established an energy unit, through fiscal year 2010, electricity savings alone equaled over 8 million kWh, an 18 percent reduction in the more than 2 million square foot port-folio of state-owned buildings.

At Western Michigan University, Peter Strazdas, associate vice president for facilities management, says it was less a point of policy and more of a revolution that brought sustainability

to the fore on campus. And the facilities department decided to be leaders in the

change. “We elected to participate

with the students and the fac-ulty in this cultural transfor-mation to a more sustainable

campus,” Strazdas says. “We found a common vision between

our facilities’ needs to be more sustainable and some of the students’ cultural needs to be more sustainable on campus.”

What really turned the tide was the renovation of the College of Health and Human Services in 2008. With a new university president who wanted to focus more on LEED certification, ac-cording to Strazdas, the facility became the first LEED-EBOM Gold building in higher education in the world. The focus on existing buildings had only begun in earnest in 2008, so there was a bit of education for the staff. “We had to transform a lot of oper-ating practices, processes and materials and educa-tion for the staff in that building,” Strazdas says. “The transformation was so successful in that one building that it cascaded across the oth-er 150 buildings on campus.”

Of course, not every build-ing on Western Michigan’s campus is LEED-EBOM certified, but it ramped up changes in the way the 8 million square foot campus operates. The move to sustainability began in the late ‘90s, with the construction of the Parkview campus, and collective

efforts since then have yielded an 18 percent decrease in total campus en-ergy consumption, even though the building square footage increased by 17 percent.

calling in the expertsInitiatives like systemwide adoption

of sustainability don’t succeed without leadership. But they also don’t succeed without the right team in place. One of the ways the State of Oklahoma’s of-fice of facilities management was able to achieve its many gains was through a fundamental restructuring of the organization and specializing job de-scriptions. In addition to the office of facilities management’s energy group, units for finance and purchasing were established. Instead of having teams dedicated to a building, facilities man-agement functions were centralized with in-house specialists being sent out to buildings as needed.

Hiring for and using existing in-house expertise not only provided significant efficiencies but also cost savings. For example, the building automation system is now serviced in-house by Cherry and a team he has trained. In the last three years, they

have not had a single outside service call for building automation. This al-lows them to spend that money on infrastructure for the BAS to improve and expand the system.

The synergies extend beyond main-

Building Operating Management/August ’11 25

tenance and operations. With contract officers who are more closely versed in facilities management, contracts are negotiated without costly scope overruns. For example, 20 chillers had previously been on full-service contracts because the people setting

up the contracts hadn’t understood the actual scope of need. Last year, the contract was rebid to cover just annual and recurring maintenance, with repair work on an on-call basis. Cherry says they’ve saved $100,000 in the first year and expect to save more in subsequent years.

At the other end of the spectrum, at PNC Financial Services Group, pro-viding excellent facilities management required recognizing when a project was beyond in-house capabilities and creating a smart partnership with an outside vendor.

PNC has been growing steadily over the years, with acquisitions rolling in every other year. When the National City acquisition was finalized in 2008, John Zurinskas, vice president and group regional manager with PNC Re-alty Services, knew merging the two organizations’ real estate portfolios was going to be a challenge. Zurinskas had many conversions under his belt, including a large one comprising 320 buildings. But the National City acqui-sition was far bigger: 1,640 branches nationwide, including 26,000 signs. PNC decided the conversion would

take place in four waves, with around 400 sites per wave. Every two months, a new wave would kick off, with the whole process starting in August 2009 and wrapping up in June 2010. Pulling it off required coordinating thousands of people, from bank personnel to sign manufacturers (10 of them) to trades-men like carpenters and painters.

Zurinskas had always worked with a sign consultant, but facing the enor-mity and complexity of the task pushed him to upgrade to a firm he considered a “Cadillac” in the field: Monigle As-sociates. “I didn’t need that kind of horsepower to do the conversions we had been doing,” Zurinskas says. “But when we came across National City’s

acquisition, I knew I had to bring in a larger

firm to help coordinate this thing.” They helped

with creating a timeline and keeping Zurinskas’

team accountable for meet-ing necessary deadlines.

This allowed PNC to form the task groups and focus

on the “internal horsepower” they needed for the job.

For example, with two big banks coming together, getting informa-tion down through the internal chain to avoid confusion was challenging. With any large acquisition, Zurinskas says, there are often concerns, rumors and miscommunication coming from outside the project team. To avoid this, frequent bulletin board progress updates were posted. Prior to the sign conversion beginning in each market, a notification was sent out describing the general sign conversion process, what to expect and how to address issues. Finally, individual site installation no-tifications were sent the week prior to actual scheduled work beginning at each site.

Not only did all these ef-forts allow for the mammoth conversion to go off as planned, but they actually managed a 16.5 percent savings compared to what the sign conversion process had previously cost, Zurinskas says. This was in part due to the economy tank-ing, making for sharper competition among the sign manufacturers. But the in-house capabilities of the sign

consultant also allowed PNC to throw all kinds of “what ifs” at them. What if they changed from neon tubing to LEDs? The consultant was able to do the necessary research and analysis amid everything else going on in the conversion. Working with the consul-tant led to a cheaper-to-manufacture sign using LEDs. What’s more, some signs were redesigned with less metal, and sign contracts were awarded in a manner that created advantageous pricing.

double-dipping impactOne successful strategy among the

FMXcellence winners was making an initiative work double-time, in ef-fect stretching resources for more re-sults. At Western Michigan, Strazdas called this “double-dipping.” When he thinks of what projects to pursue in a coming year and where to allocate funds, three things are taken into con-sideration: the return on investment, the impact on energy consumption and whether it will also address a de-ferred maintenance need.

But the king of the double-dip is Hays Consolidated Independent School District in Buda, Texas, and its ingenious funding mechanism for energy efficiency. A 2003 audit found

the school district needed to do two things: institute an energy management program and figure out a way to fund replacing the maintenance vehicle fleet. And then came the ah-ha moment —

why not use one to fund the other? They didn’t stop at funding a new

fleet, but broke down the potential energy cost savings to give some mon-ey back to the schools, fund energy efficiency initiatives, hire new staff and even set money aside to cover en-ergy rate increases, says R.C. Herrin, executive director of maintenance

and operation, Hays CISD. To determine a baseline for savings,

existing campuses were given an energy budget equal to their electricity costs in fiscal year 2002-2003 for their build-ing; facilities constructed after that were budgeted at $1 per square foot for electricity. Savings due to energy

efficiency initiatives enacted under the

energy management program have returned

$250,000 to the schools, set aside $450,000 to

guard against electricity rate increases, and allowed

the district to hire person-nel, including two energy manage-ment technicians whose salaries are fully funded by the energy savings they achieve, says Herrin.

“Everything they do, every time they touch a piece of equipment, not only is it repairing something, but it’s using less electricity,” Herrin says. At Hays,

everything is about efficiency. The first position hired with the energy savings was an evening coil cleaner. Cleaning the coils in the evenings removes the interruption to the school. And coils cleaned in a timely fashion mean equip-ment is running efficiently. The evening maintenance program has grown to a staff of 13, doing everything from coil cleaning to campus delamping, without needing overtime or weekend hours.

Working Hard for the MoneyA great boon for the Hays program

is that the savings are protected by school board policy, so the $450,000 in the fund balance will not be touched for other cash-starved needs in the dis-trict. This might seem nothing short of miraculous to some facility manag-ers, who see the savings their depart-ments generate quickly swallowed by the needs of the larger organization. Though they acknowledge this is of-ten the case, the FMXcellence winners

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say establishing what needs to be done with the savings is an important part of success.

“This type of funding vehicle, the way it’s successful is if you don’t ask for more money to fund these projects,” says Herrin. “But it can only work if

funding is not cut.”At Western Michigan, they take en-

ergy savings dollars and roll them into next year’s energy conservation mea-sures. So far, the university administra-tion has not moved to claim the sav-ings for other purposes, though they

could, says Strazdas. But why would they want to slow down a successful program, he says, adding that it’s the facility manager’s job to make sure the larger organization understands the benefits of energy savings programs. “Every year, you’ve got to keep leaning on the horn,” Strazdas says. “We have continued to regularly toot our horn relative to the success of our energy conservation measures. And the regu-larity of tooting our horn is probably the reason why the dollars have not gone elsewhere.”

It’s a similar situation at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, in Charlotte, N.C., where Philip Berman, executive director for building services, got the district’s financial department to agree for the last four years to return budget underrun funds back to his depart-ment, to the tune of $5 million, which he was able to put back into low-hang-ing fruit projects, like lighting retrofits. These savings were garnered, again, by a adopting a systematic approach to energy efficiency and sustainability measures through an environmental stewardship charter, with buy-in from the Board of Education and superin-tendent. The charter was approved as a cost-neutral project; to support it, Ber-man pursued alternate funding such as grants and rebates.

Berman provides quarterly reports to the school system’s executives, giv-ing him a forum to spread the word about his team’s work. “As they saw us being successful each year, we told them what we had to do to continue the success,” Berman says, adding that facility managers have to market their success to safeguard their initiatives. “You can’t just sit back. You have to say what you’re going to do, do what you said and then communicate what you did.”

As the winners of this year’s FMX-cellence award show, achieving excel-lence in facilities management is pos-sible through leadership and ingenuity, and really stretching the boundaries of what is possible with the resources at hand. As Berman says, “There’s a dif-ference between a manager, a supervi-sor and a leader.”

Email comments and questions to naomi.millan@tradepress.com.

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