Utilities Costs and Best Practices

Using FM BENCHMARKING to improve performance: a real case study

For most buildings, Utilities represent the largest component of operating expenses, so you will want to collect as much information as you can for this section and verify that it is accurate. You don’t have to input any of the detailed breakdowns of data, but the more detail input into the system, the more useful information the system will be able to provide back to you.

The first section covers costs and consumption quantities (you are looking at a portion of a data input screen)

A useful output from this data is the cost of electricity per gross square foot for facilities of a similar size. In the example below, we filtered for all facilities greater than 600,000 square feet with an age between 21 and 50 years; we are comparing a ‘subject building’ to all others that meet the filter criteria. The sample chart is shown below

Each filtered participant is represented by one of the vertical lines. The various quartiles are shown in different colors, the median is the horizontal red line, and the subject building’s performance is shown in yellow (in the second quartile).

This facility manger reviewed this data and decided he needed to reduce the energy costs at the facility. One of the features in FM BENCHMARKING is integrated best practices with costs by quartile. Each participant is asked to answer YES or NO to a list of 31 BEST PRACTICES for the Utilities section of the survey (there are Best Practices provided for each section of the survey and we will cover those in subsequent articles). A few of the questions are shown below

In the output section of FM BENCHMARKING, we will use this information to compare the responses. A few of the 31 best practices results are shown below

In the above chart, the first of the last three columns shows whether the best practice was followed in the subject building; the second shows what percentage of other buildings in the subject building’s ‘quartile’ (the second one) have implemented that best practice; and the last column shows the percentage in the next better-performing quartile (in this case, the first).

After reviewing the results from this chart, the subject building’s facility director implemented some of the best practices in the next better performing quartile such as:

  • Motion sensors in the general office space
  • Motion sensors in the restrooms
  • Implementation of the re-commissioning recommendations
  • Plate and frame heat exchangers (the facility is in Florida where this really works well)
  • Additional Insulation
  • Several others

The facility manager believes from the preliminary data that he will improve to first-quartile performance within six months, and is planning to improve performance in several other operating cost areas shortly.

Articles are based on data from FM BENCHMARKING, which until the pandemic had been the online benchmarking tool for facility managers and CREs. Data tracked by FM BENCHMARKING includes cost and labor data as well as best practices for more than 95% of typical facility costs. For questions about benchmarking, please contact Peter Kimmel on LinkedIn. Peter was one of the principals of FM BENCHMARKING and now is consulting in the industry.