by Brianna Crandall — April 22, 2022 — The IFMA Foundation, established in 1990 as a nonprofit research and education corporation and a separate entity from the International Facility Management Association (IFMA), has just announced that it has expanded the scope of the Eric Teicholz Sustainability Facility Professional (SFP) Scholarship Program to include corporate partners. The goal of the SFP Partner Program is to make additional scholarships available and provide an opportunity for organizations to support a sustainable future, creating a generation of facilities management (FM) leaders committed to environmental best practices. Partner organizations can opt to introduce a scholarship program in a topic area of their choosing or join an existing program, such as the newly launched SFP Partner Supply Chain Program.
Eric Teicholz, IFMA Fellow, graduated with a master’s degree in architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where he later became an associate professor and the associate director of the university’s largest R+D facility, the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis. He also is the author/editor of 17 books related to FM, CAFM/IWMS and GIS technology. Teicholz was awarded the U.S. Navy’s Superior Public Service Award by the Secretary of the Navy under President George W. Bush for his participation on a blue-ribbon FM panel defining the future strategy for naval shore facilities. Teicholz has served on IFMA’s Global Board of Directors and as a trustee to the IFMA Foundation, and is currently a member of IFMA’s Environmental Stewardship, Utilities and Sustainability (ESUS) committee.
SFP Partner Supply Chain Program
The latest program created by the IFMA Foundation is related to the impact of the supply chain on FMs’ ability to maintain their facilities and critical assets. As the world emerges from the pandemic, FM organizations have a unique opportunity to drive significant, sustainable operational improvements while reducing costs and waste systemically. Within this scope, it’s important for FM leaders to expand their focus to include supply chain value creation — focusing not only on purchase price for their critical spare parts and supplies, but also on optimizing the total cost of ownership of their facilities including maximizing technician productivity, increasing asset uptime, and improving their customer in-store experience.
With awards starting in 2022, the SFP Partner Supply Chain Program is the result of collaboration between IFMA Foundation and SDI, The Digital Supply Chain Company. Jim Owens, chief growth officer at SDI and Advisory Board member for Penn State’s Center for Supply Chain Research, remarked:
Facilities managers, building owners, suppliers, technicians — all work in silos in the FM ecosystem, inadvertently creating millions of metric tons of greenhouse gases. We’re excited to work with the IFMA Foundation to empower the FM leaders of the future to engage in climate action by aligning and improving supply chain processes and reimagining how supply chain can work for work for everyone.
SDI is a supply chain solutions and services company that specializes in helping large, multi-site FM leaders reduce costs and risks while driving overall performance results and outcomes. Over SDI’s more than 50 years of experience, the company says it has helped hundreds of organizations align and integrate their parts supply chain with their FM strategy to drive improvements in key performance indicators (KPIs) such as first call completion, mean time to repair, and wrench time.
The company’s service offering is further enhanced by its ZEUS Digital Supply Chain Management, platform now available on the Apple Store. SDI’s digital supply chain control tower coordinates, aligns and optimizes with overall facilities management, enterprise risk management, and reliability strategies. Lower costs, smarter inventories and more reliable facilities are all natural results from a more connected supply chain, says the company.
For more information about the Eric Teicholz Sustainability Scholarship Program, visit the IFMA Foundation website. The IFMA Foundation was established in 1990 as a nonprofit research and education corporation and a separate entity from the International Facility Management Association (IFMA).
