If you have been in the facility industry long enough, you have likely heard on numerous occasions “the Facilities Department is not a profit center”, “facilities is a necessary evil”, “you are just overhead”, and many other doozies. While the facilities department does not necessarily manufacture the widgets or process the transactions of our respective organizations, it does have a direct impact on how well and how fast those revenue generating functions occur. Unfortunately, management and even facility staff label the department as a cost center and not an enabler of profit.

What if you went to management with an idea that would increase worker productivity by 8% – would they listen? Let’s run the numbers. Assume you have 300 employees in your facility at a burdened rate of $100,000 per year; that equates to $30M per year in cost. An 8% production increase would equate to $2.4 million dollars. Now do you have their attention??? When you look at it from that perspective, it is easy to see why large corporations invest in professional cafeterias, on-site daycare, exercise rooms, at-work automotive services, etc. – anything to keep the employees, their largest investment, working and productive.

Sadly, facility organizations are more driven by reducing costs than by increasing production – this is both self-induced and thrust upon by upper management; largely because neither understand nor attempt to quantify the impact the performance of facilities and its teams have on production. Thankfully there have been multiple studies conducted that help to quantify that effect. So let’s explore some of those findings and utilize them to show our fellow facility professionals and upper management the larger role facilities plays in driving the bottom line...