Answering this seemingly simple question has managers taking a hard look at how departments operate

— By Dan Hounsell, Editor

In a sense, productivity is like obscenity. Defining it can be difficult, but most people believe they know it when they see it.

Unfortunately, in today’s highly competitive, bottom-line-conscious facilities, simply believing productivity exists is no longer enough. When it comes to judging the performance of maintenance and engineering departments, managers are being asked to do more than just make sure facilities look good and operate efficiently.

Managers are under pressure to wring every last bit of productivity from their work forces, but many struggle to define and quantify productive time. Nonetheless, the more closely managers look at their operations, the more opportunities they see for increasing productivity, whether it’s through better scheduling, more technology applications or streamlining the flow of work orders.

“A lot of time is spent turning a piece of paper around and pointing it in some other direction,” says Jim Vibbart, manager of work control in the physical plant at the University of Michigan.

Driving forces
Not surprisingly, the push for productivity often starts at the bottom line.

In the case of the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), the driving force to measure and increase maintenance workers’ productivity came from a budget change four years ago, says Rick Moore, MPS director of the division of facilities and maintenance services. In a cost-cutting move, the district distributed part of Moore’s budget to individual schools, where officials could spend it at their discretion.

So, instead of being locked into the district’s maintenance services, school officials were free to choose their provider. As a result, Moore’s division found itself competing head to head with outside contractors.

So, to compete successfully and ensure the schools spent that money within the district, Moore says, his division needed to take steps to measure and increase worker productivity.

Middletown (Ohio) Regional Hospital, like many healthcare facilities, saw its reimbursements diminish in the mid-’90s. Three years ago, the changing financial picture prompted the hospital to freeze budgets but demand greater productivity to keep the hospital operating efficiently, says John McKinney, the hospital’s director of facility management services and safety.

Getting workers to buy into the need for greater productivity wasn’t difficult, McKinney says, especially after three hospitals in the area closed due to competition for scarce health-care dollars.

“That gets the attention of the workers,” McKinney says. “Overall, everyone in the organization understands the impact of competition.”

Defining ‘productive’
Once the pursuit of greater productivity begins, managers often look for a “magic” number — a benchmark figure that will allow them to determine whether or not their work force is productive. In some cases, they look for that number outside the organization, most often from an association or a peer facility.

Unfortunately, a reliable, relevant figure is almost impossible to come by. National averages based on data from a range of facilities might not be as specific as a manager needs, since facilities gather different data in different ways. Even statistics shared between peer facilities — from one large public Midwestern university to another, for instance — probably won’t be as relevant as necessary because key factors such as facilities systems and staff skill levels often differ.

For example, Tom Kinman, vice president of facility management at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, says he came across a statistic that measured hospitals’ hours of maintenance per 1,000 square feet. Unfortunately, the figure wasn’t useful to Kinman because it didn’t take into account money spent on contract services.

Instead, he decided to use the maintenance cost per square foot as a benchmark. But even that statistic is difficult to compare between facilities, he says, because managers differ in their interpretation of maintained space — some include roofs and parking garages, for example.

Also, Vibbart says, the cost-per-square-foot figure can be misleading in terms of measuring productivity, since it often includes equipment costs and is not just a measure or a worker’s output. And once managers arrive at a figure that they believe is a productivity benchmark, they often have to tailor it for different departments or shops.

“What’s productive for one shop might almost be a degradation in service for another,” he says.

So what do managers do? Usually, they develop their own calculations tailored to their facilities specific needs and goals.

For example, McKinney says one metric he monitors closely in assessing productivity is work-order completion rates compared to maintenance work order backlog.

At the University of Michigan, Vibbart is developing a series of reports designed to give managers and staff a deeper understanding of the many factors that go into productivity and work flow. The reports will focus on the cost, timeliness and quality of the work the physical plant does. For example, among the cost issues Vibbart examined are shop budgets vs. actual costs, unbillable paid time, estimated vs. actual costs, and shop billing rates.

Productivity strategies
Once the calculations are done and the strategies are in place, the next step for managers is to actually put systems, processes, materials and equipment in place to help workers become more productive.

For example, facilities can find increased productivity in ensuring that workers are performing tasks that best match their skills. Vibbart refers to this process as setting “boundaries” for workers and then making sure workers understand and respect those boundaries.

Matching the right worker to the right job can be a big problem.

“A job that takes one person four hours can take another person seven hours,” Moore says. “We try to assign jobs based on expertise.” So instead of building engineers doing minor repair work, Moore emphasizes that they should focus on jobs that require their particular skills, such as maintaining boiler and ventilation units.

And facilities shouldn’t overlook the role that efficient building systems play in productivity. Kinman has specified programmable logic controllers for all building controls, partly because they automatically gather data on facility conditions that workers otherwise had to gather manually in response to occupant complaints.

“A lot of labor was going into running after those calls,” he says.

McKinney also cites greater building automation as a productivity booster. Replacing and upgrading systems, such as the hospital’s pneumatic tube system, has eliminated all maintenance requests related to system problems.

“We’ve been able to decrease repair time to almost nothing,” he says.

Moore says his division has taken a series of steps to increase productivity, including making greater use of e-mail to communicate work-order data, “ganging up” work orders based on location, and examining the workload ramifications of a buy-or-lease decision.

Finally, Kinman emphasizes the importance of hiring and developing workers who have the most valuable productivity ingredient — the ability to quickly troubleshoot problems.

“The most valuable player in a maintenance department is a troubleshooter,” he says. “It’s an art.”

Managers know that the quest to define productivity has only just begun and that, in many cases, the quest is nearly unending.

Says Vibbart, “We’re attacking the mole hills. We haven’t gotten to the mountains yet.”