CIB Facilities Management Conference

Copenhagen Town Hall

Per Anker Jensen at the welcome reception

It was a delight to talk to Professor Per Anker Jensen in the Town Hall of Trondheim last summer and hear about their Centre for Facilities Management (CFM) at DTU. I was there for presenting my work on life cycle support information systems in the 7th Nordic Conference on Construction Economics and Organization. I did however not have the faintest idea that I will submit my next working paper to the CIB FM Conference and meet Per again in the Town Hall of Copenhagen a year later. The CIB Facilities Management Conference was organised by the CIB Working Commission W070 (Facilities Management) in collaboration with W111 (Usability) and W118 (Clients and Users) at Technical University of Denmark in the dreamy city of Copenhagen 21st to 23rd May.

Søren Salomo, head of department of DTU Management Engineering, welcomed the audience to the conference. He briefly adressed the central theme of the conference, "using facilities in an open world and creating value for all stakeholders" as wel as related challenges including energy efficiency and new materials. Professor Danny Then (representing W070) explained how challenges such as the need for provision of social housing and efficient resource management bear on FM research and practice. He also clarified how asset management and maintenance have recently been more closely linked to other areas such as workplace design and Building Information Modelling (BIM). This was followed by Professor Geir Hansen's speech about W111 and Dr. Kim Haugbølle's presentation on the role of users and clients and the urge for a closer collaboration and mutual understanding among various actors within the sector.

The very first keynote speaker of the first day was Jacob Steen Møller, director of facilities of DTU Campus Service. He provided a brief history of the previous and current campus buildings of DTU and as well as the structure, business model and business strategy of the FM organization. The business model of the FM section is basically outlined by the university's overall business goals and missions. In contrast to the initial designer-centric top-down layout of the campus area, current strategic plan of DTU facilities is mainly derived from the needs of the users and therefore allows a more flexible planning and a broader variety of architectural styles and construction materials.

The overall goal of the plan is to fulfill the requirements of co-locating, growth and efficiency; while the main principles of the contemporary planning strategy of DTU are as followed:

• Maintaining the initial axial structure
• Hierarchical order of outer and inner spaces for a clearer sense of location
• Park and landscape (the campus is considered as the edge of the woods)
• More free forms in the design of buildings and facades
• Car, bike and prospective light rail traffic

Campus area of The Technical University of Denmark (Source)

In line with the central theme of the conference, Jacob notified the importance of educating users and clients about the construction procedure, the briefing phase and when and how they can influence the process, opening up the spaces around the campus and letting different user groups from the society to use them, make facilities and information on facilities available for research, developing business cases for leasing, involving students and professors in design and operation, and integrating FM into value creation strategies.

The first speaker of the first track (FM performance and industry maturity) was Sarel Lavy from Texas A&M University who contemplated on key performance indicators, the relation among the organizational goals and the facility goals and critical success factors. The major categories of benchmarking indexes, according to him, are financial, physical, functional and survey-based. In the following presentation, Professor Danny Then introduced his proposal for measuring FM maturity across organizations via an integrated feeder factors framework.

Then, Tuuli Jylhä from Aalto University presented an intriguing study on how unplanned activities (so called "making-do" activities) precipitated by insufficient or missing information impede value creation in FM organizations. It is nevertheless always a tricky job to maintain the balance between timely decision-making and waiting for complete information.

In the afternoon session (Track 4: Clients and users), Pieter Eisma from TU Delft presented a literature review on public clients in construction. Together with Leentje Volker, they had queried Scopus and JSTORE databases and through qualitative and quantitative analyses concluded that the majority of issues were associated with organizing and setting up the project. Rikke Brinkø reviewed some theoretical and practical grounds of sharing spaces and Mohammad Mayouf talked about incorporating BIM into facilities management.

A number of useful tips on how to get published were provided by Emma Steele, Sarel Lavy and Joseph Lai from the journal Facilities. Choosing topics of importance, focusing on areas with little existing knowledge, basing papers on rigorous research work, use of evidences, objectivity and the importance of the keywords were some of their hints.

Nyhavn, Copenhagen

Liselotte Panduro from the Danish Facilities Management Association (DFM) opened the second day with introducing their organization with 150 members including real estate companies and providers. She then addressed the ten top FM trends articulated by the International Facility Management Association (IFMA), which could be shortlisted as sustainability, complex building systems, aging building stock, business continuity, information management, attracting top talents, improving the recognition of the profession, strategic thinking, contributing to the well being of the society and changing work styles.

The keynote speaker of the second day, Juriaan van Meel from CFM, contemplated on the challenges ahead of and the possibilities envisioned by living in an open world. In practice, gated communities and secured spaces still do exist. The risks of working at open and shared spaces such as cafes in comparison to the closed and fully managed offices are, nevertheless, being gradually outweighed by their benefits. Flexibility with time and location, lower costs and cozy milieus are some examples. Juriaan then introduced the concept of "cowork spaces" which implies a spatial and temporal superimposition of office spaces and public spaces. Contemporary cowork spaces are, in essence, grounded on sharing both spaces and values. Cowork spaces are, however, still marginal and more popular among hipsters and IT savvy entrepreneurs.

I was the first speaker of the practice track one "invited speakers and case studies" which was a joint session together with representatives from the industry chaired by Poul Henrik Due, the chief advisor at Grontmij. The idea of this work was incepted last year when Johannes Dimyadi approached me after my presentation at CIB2013 in Brisbane and briefly explained the development process and architecture of the BIM-integrated information management system that he and his colleagues had designed and implemented in two campus areas of Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand. I found it an appropriate case for my research and during the ensuing year, we were constantly in contact from the two opposite sides of the planet. In a nutshell, our paper takes Unitec's FM system as a purposive-sampling case and reports on how a number of technical issues prevailing in other BIM-based FM systems have been dealt with in this example.

Statistics by Signal Architects showing
underused educational spaces

The second speaker, Per Feldthaus from Signal Architects, presented their performance-based approach to design of interior spaces. Performance matrices provide designers with statistical analytic tools to reconfigure spatial layouts of workplaces and optimize the firms' use of space. The research presented by Marit Støre was a study for benchmarking FM departments of a number of hospitals in Nordic countries. Data on logistics, cleaning, catering and other FM services had been collected with the aim of quantitatively outlining the perception of a "best practice" in FM using the Balance Score Card methodology. The overall aim of such studies is to investigate how to adjust FM strategies to be better aligned with the core strategies of the firms. The results show that there is no strong corelation among FM competences and FM services of firms. Swedish hospitals possess higher FM competency than their Danish and Norwegian counterparts. Swedish hospitals also have the highest amount of outsourcing FM services.

Siri Blakstad from Reinertsen presented her study on workplace management. Flexibility for better compliance with the fast pace of development of new technologies, reducing operational costs and area efficiency were the major themes of her presentation. She also addressed the required qualifications associated with different operational roles in FM firms: strategic understanding for the top management, timely and informed decision making for the operational staff and the optimum ways of working for the staff.

The first speaker of the afternoon session of the second day was Søren S. Prahl from Novozymes. An interesting part of Søren's presentation was the risk assessment tables that they had developed for clients demonstrating - both in numbers and colors - the estimated costliness of different decisions for maintenance or replacement of equipment and spaces. He also elaborated on the three major categories of FM goals (strategic, tactical and operational) and various features of a successful FM practice such as the importance of personal competencies and leadership and communication skills. 

Conference dinner at SSI; left to right: Frédéric Bougrain,
Tuuli Jylhä, me, Marleen Hermans and Manish Dixit

Poul Henrik Due outlined his proposal for FM screening logs to be implemented at early stages of feasibility and briefing of construction projects. The core idea is to inform the client about the FM consequences of each design alternative based on in-depth analyses and earlier experiences. The "logs" will be maintained, completed and retrieved for the purpose of quality insurance and benchmarking during the consecutive stages. Michael Zobl from the Vienna University of Technology (TU-Wien) reported the outcomes of their research survey on 500 firms using the Mixed Method Approach (qualitative and quantitative). According to the results, there is no correlation among outsourcing facility services (or more accurately increasing the number of the external service providers) and reducing the costs. Outsourcing may reduce the costs of the firm, but at the same time, increases the risks. The authors conclude that there is a tendency to overestimate the advantages of outsourcing.

The second day of the conference was wrapped up with an inspiring visit to the new headquarter building of ISS, the prominent facility services company where Caspar Isager Hansen, the PMO Manager, explained their services and the location procedure from their old building. His talk was followed by a guided tour around the building and the joint conference dinner.

Workstations layout at ISS headquarters

In the first research track of the third day, Christopher Heywood from the University of Melbourne described a case of relocation of educational facilities. The focus of the study was on the psycho-social factors that impact individual users' experiences during the relocation process. Data were collected through interviews, diaries and observation. The findings show that the way different people experience relocation is not homogeneous rather it is individual and in principle different from one person to another.

Sari Tähtinen from Aalto University presented a study on user experiences of a creative class district in Helsinki using the 6T model. According to the 6T model, tune, tempo, task, ties, tales and theme are the six major factors that shape the experience of a place for the user.

The research track 10 (FM innovation and technology) was opened with a presentation by Nils Olsson from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) on the use of Big Data for evaluation of buildings. Big Data is defined as a huge amount of data that can not be analyzed by traditional database tools. Volume, velocity and variety are the features that differentiate Big Data from normal data. Availability, applicability, relevance and privacy are some of challenges ahead of implementing Big Data more ubiquitously.

Giulia Nardelli from DTU provided an overview of the tools for including stakeholders in FM service design. In this approach, clients, customers and end users are also considered as co-creators and resources for innovation in the FM firm. Stakeholders could be involved in a variety of traditional and ICT-based as well as direct and indirect ways. It is recommended to accurately plan stakeholder participation in the areas of strategic decision making. The very last presentation was given by Poul Ebbesen from DTU about implementation of Information Technology in facilities management. I met Poul in March during the bSI conference in Stockholm for the first time. While my studies are focused on implementing object-oriented technologies and database management systems in FM, long experience in the FM sector has provided him a broader insight to see the full picture. He is therefore determined not to limit himself to any of the pertaining epistemological fields of innovation management, organizational theories, implementation or socio-technical theories; rather to focus on value creation and to embrace a variety of conceptual frameworks in pursuit of a more realistic solution.

Finally, during the closing session, Professor Keith Jones from Anglia Ruskin University presented his report on prevailing and emerging subject areas in the field of facilities management and usability derived from a Delphi survey before Per Anker Jensen made the final remarks. As evidenced in the majority of the works presented, the importance of scientific facilities management has recently gained greater recognition and the shift from a practice-based profession overwhelmed with short-term strategies and ad-hoc solutions to a fully coordinated discipline is gaining momentum.