Founded in 1802, DuPont now operates more than 200 facilities in 70 countries with annual sales revenue greater than $27 billion. The company has approximately 60,000 employees who develop, manufacture and market DuPont's 1,000+ brands including well-known products such as DuPont Corian®, DuPont Teflon®, and DuPont Kevlar®.

DuPont is a science company whose goal is to put science to work solving problems in ways that make lives better, safer, and healthier. All businesses and functions within DuPont share a common set of core values that have remained constant as DuPont grew from its origins as an explosives company to today's global science company. Safety and health, environmental stewardship, high ethical standards, and respect and value for people continue to be the values of DuPont.

Facilities Services & Real Estate is one of several leveraged functions that support DuPont businesses globally. FS&RE manages more than 10 million square feet of space at office and laboratory sites worldwide as well as approximately 9,000 acres of surplus property, including the sale and disposal of excess properties and facilities within the United States.

The Power of One

"In recent years, there has been an intensive effort at DuPont to reduce its operating footprint and the cost of owning and operating capital intensive assets," says Judy Passwaters, Global FS&RE Director. "We are constantly looking for ways to increase the operating efficiency of our physical assets and are putting in place improved work processes, systems, and management practices to ensure optimum deployment of both human resources and capital dollars."

In January 2004, DuPont initiated a widespread corporate change including the sale of its Textile Fibers businesses and the reorganization of internal business and functional structures. One of three key management strategies that emerged from this massive shift was recognizing the value and power of "One DuPont."

Prior to 2004, DuPont business units were very independent and autonomous operations. "Business units were accountable for all activities and controlled just about everything in their businesses' supply chain," says Passwaters. "Today in DuPont you will find a much greater degree of business and functional collaboration and shared accountability for delivering world-class business results."

The power of "One DuPont" is focused on eliminating duplication of effort and identifying pockets of excellence that can be shared and leveraged across the company. Rather than using different work practices and systems at each site or within business units, the new organization aims for global standardization and adoption of corporate best practices.

As a result, DuPont business leaders focus solely on customer needs, new product development, and growth, while accountability for production and related support activities is handled by functional organizations such as Operations, Engineering, FS&RE, Human Resources, and Sourcing.

"This delineation of responsibility encourages everyone to focus on their area of expertise and enables DuPont to take advantage of the leveraging, synergy, and buying power available to large organizations," says Passwaters.

FS&RE Strategies

"FS&RE's facilities transformation is very much aligned with the 'One DuPont' concept," says Passwaters. "We are beginning to apply common best practices, work processes, and systems across DuPont offices and laboratories globally to optimize space, reduce cost, and create competitive workplace solutions for DuPont."

One of FS&RE's success criteria is measurement of its competitive position against external competition. To that end, FS&RE global leadership recently engaged in a comprehensive review of trends in the facilities and real estate industry with a group of leaders from several large, global real estate/property management firms, an architectural firm, and facilities benchmarking firms to gauge their progress and direction versus others in the industry.

Learning from this interaction and benchmarking data, FS&RE developed a five-year transformation plan that aligns with the revitalized corporate direction and DuPont business unit strategies. FS&RE leadership established four key long-term goals for transforming the function from a cost burden to a value-adding business partner in DuPont:

Today, FS&RE manages 61 facilities globally, ranging from single office sites to office and laboratory complexes with as many as 50 buildings in a campus setting. FS&RE has begun to examine the potential for improved utilization of DuPont assets by combining additional non-production assets into a single operating model.

"In this new model, operation of stand alone office and lab sites, as well as non-production assets typically found on manufacturing sites might be operated using a common, leveraged set of processes, procedures, and systems that are unique and different from many of the processes and systems required to operate production assets," says Passwaters. "Using common facilities managing processes and best practices to operate non-manufacturing assets such as power, utilities, waste treatment, roads and grounds, etc., within these sites would enable DuPont manufacturing experts to focus on issues related specifically to product production rather than support infrastructure."

Centers of Competency

One of the processes FS&RE sees as critical to operating a successful facilities model in a complex and diverse company such as DuPont, is development of Centers of Competency to identify, standardize, and implement competitive best practices that can be broadly leveraged.

"The key to a successful Center of Competency process is to identify those practices and core work processes that are truly critical to the function's success, ensure they are competitive, then leverage them across many sites. In this operating model, benchmarking is an essential element and occurs during all phases of implementation—core process definition, best practice implementation, and ongoing continuous improvement phases," says Passwaters.

Productivity through Six Sigma

Six years ago DuPont embarked on a journey to improve corporate productivity through the use of Six Sigma. Today all DuPont businesses and functions have aggressive Six Sigma goals and programs. FS&RE applies Six Sigma to all facets of its operation on a project-by-project basis.

"Six Sigma is how we measure and track defect elimination and control variation to achieve and sustain productivity gains," says Passwaters. "We have completed more than 240 projects delivering $25 million in validated savings to the DuPont bottom line.

"A critical element of Six Sigma is training and skill building at a broad-base level," she continues. "In 2003, FS&RE started on a two-year journey to train and certify 100 percent of its professional organization in the use of the DuPont Six Sigma methodology. This is not a trivial task, but we are on target to meet our goal by year-end 2005!"

Lessons Learned

In conclusion, Passwaters offers the following advice for organizations attempting to re-position themselves from being viewed as a burden cost to becoming a valued partner in their company's business success:

"At DuPont, we are about sustainable growth through science, not facilities," says Passwaters. "In FS&RE we constantly remind ourselves that our mission is to create workplace solutions and environments that enable, encourage, and support innovation and business success. This is how FS&RE will become a valued business partner and help DuPont remain competitive and profitable in its third century of operation."

By Amy Cammell