12212016 How quickly should they answer my call Keeping on top of KPIs in Facilities Management shy Industry perspectives

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Industry perspectivesFocusing on the actions needed by industrial sectors today in order to make the most of tomorrow

How quickly should they answer my call Keeping on top of KPIs in FacilitiesManagement

09 December 2016By Derrick Tate

Effectively managing the performance of facilities management suppliers is a challenge for many organisationsPractically how do you monitor and track performance in a meaningful way What should you do if performance is belowpar

Payment on delivery

I get frustrated when I see poor performance management mechanisms It should be simple Do the job on time asspecified and you get paid donrsquot do the job to the required quality or complete it late and you suffer a preshyagreedconsequence All too often contracts are constructed with complicated performance management mechanisms thatneither the client nor the supplier understand It is not unusual to see a really complicated spreadsheet with hundreds ofmeasures and obscure metrics Inevitably these monitoring mechanisms make it difficult to assess actual performanceweaken performance management and can lead to poor supplier performance A good rule of thumb is that you should beable to articulate what the measures are and if they are being met without running calculations on a spreadsheet Toquote Einstein ldquoIf you cant explain it to a six year old you dont understand it yourselfrdquo

Effective performance management needs to start with the team deciding what level of service are needed and translatingthat into written service levels which are meaningful and target something that matters to your business

What exactly is the difference between a service level and a key performance indicator

A common service level reads something like ldquoall telephone calls to the helpdesk to be answered within 30 secondsrdquo Isthis important to your business Is it targeting something that matters In your business perhaps it does but for manyorganisations it doesnrsquot Letrsquos say it is important for you the next question is how to measure it You could have selfshyreporting by the supplier assuming that the CAFM system can record and report on call waiting times You could rely oncomplaints but how many of your colleagues are going to have a stop watch out when they ring the helpdesk In this caseit is better to change the measure to the number of rings eg ldquoanswered within 10 ringsrdquo

The service level is the level of service you require in this case calls to be answered within 10 rings The key performanceindicator is the target level at which the service level should be delivered eg ldquoThe number of complaints about thehelpdesk taking longer than 10 rings to answer each call must be less than 10 of the total calls answeredrdquo

But what happens if the helpdesk operator answers the call but puts you on hold they have met the service level as theyhave answered the call But as a customer you are still not going to be happy You have to think hard about the servicelevel How you are going to measure it and how might a supplier might get round it ldquoRespond to repairs within an hourrdquois another common example Suppliers can meet the service level by turning up ldquorespondingrdquo An engineer can comealong having a look put a bit of hazard tape up and go away without actually fixing anything They have met the ServiceLevel but you have not received good performance

Think about the consequences

Once you have service levels and key performance indicators the consequences of failing to achieve them must bemeaningful Good practice is for profit and overhead to be at risk against performance But you should model theimplications of failure Think of it from a supplierrsquos perspective Say you have a contract worth pound10m pa and the profitand overhead for one year is pound1m That sounds like a big deduction if you fail your key performance indicators But yourarely fail all of them all the time In this example pound1m translates as pound83000 in any one month If you have 20 equallyweighted key performance indicators that means that failing one will result in a deduction of just pound4000 If you had 40KPIs it is only a pound2000 deduction per failure

12212016 How quickly should they answer my call Keeping on top of KPIs in Facilities Management shy Industry perspectives

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But imagine that you are running manufacturing operations in a factory and have to shut down the assembly line for 3hours because a scheduled maintenance activity was not undertaken and The cost to your business would be much morethat the pound2000 deduction It is important therefore to try and balance the value of deductions with the actual cost toyour business

Is it really important how long it takes to answer the phone

You have to have enough key performance indicators to cover what is really important but not so many as to dilute theirimpact I have seen many contracts where it is cheaper and easier for the supplier to fail the measure month in month outthan it is to fix the actual problem In these cases both the client and the supplier have in effect accepted long term poorperformance To my mind that is not effective performance management If service levels and key performance indicatorsare well designed suppliers may fail to achieve them from time to time but the deductions should hurt enough toincentivise better performance going forward

Where they are designed properly performance management mechanisms can be an excellent tool for both clients andsuppliers Get it wrong and it can be ineffective and at worst mask poor performance Get it right and you can have a goodlevel of transparency of service performance and take action when it is not at the required level

If you want to take just one thing away from this blog just check that your service levels are specific and that they aremeasurable

Derrick Tate | Director Email | +44(0)20 721 21465

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12212016 How quickly should they answer my call Keeping on top of KPIs in Facilities Management shy Industry perspectives

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