"The success of the merger depended on how fast we could integrate those cultures into one," says Ernest Pierz, Midwest regional manager for Global Property Management (GPM) at BP.

To promote merger integration and culture change within the new company, BP Global Property Management instituted a facilities change program in 2000. At the heart of the program are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), measurements drawn from work environments in its four million-sf U.S. facilities portfolio, and a new CAFM system to track these KPIs and promote their importance to the company at large.

The CAFM/KPI system aids the move to a single culture by providing a basis for work environments at BP to have a consistent look and feel.

"If you walk into an office in Los Angeles or Chicago, for example, it may look slightly different, but it should still have a BP feel to it," says Pierz.

The system also helps to assure that work environments at BP are doing an efficient and effective job of integrating people, space, and technology.

"We have worked hard to maximize the efficiency of our workspaces over time, but the new system is helping us to maximize their effectiveness as well," says Pierz. "The real benefit of all this is an energized, happy, and productive work force."

Measuring Efficiency and Effectiveness

BP's KPIs measure both the efficiency and the effectiveness of the space. Efficiency measures include such metrics as dollars per workstation, sf per person, percent vacancies, dollars per sf, and sf per workstations.

As is the case with most companies, BP's facilities organization has been tracking efficiency numbers over the last decade. The effectiveness component presents more of a challenge, according to Pierz, because there are fewer KPIs to gauge that aspect of facility performance.

One important effectiveness KPI for BP is a facility's percentage of collaborative space. Collaborative spaces are areas where two or more people can have a conversation and share ideas. For the purposes of BP's measurements, the percentage of collaborative space is made up of two components: collaboration spaces (traditional meeting places like a conference room and less formal areas like a small table near a window) and support spaces (defined as areas where two people can bump into each other and generate an idea: mailrooms, cafeterias, or break areas).

"You need a certain amount of collaborative space to make a facility effective," says Pierz, adding, "It depends on the type of work group and the type of space. You don't need much for areas dedicated to heads-down activities like legal, finance, or computer programming. For a trading operation or customer service function or any activity where there's a lot of banter going on, you need collaborative space to promote that interaction."

To determine the right amount of collaborative space, BP researched effective facilities both inside and outside the organization. Externally, they toured notable new work environments, including stops in Silicon Valley and the UK. Internally, BP surveyed all of the tenant improvement work done around the world to determine the kind of space BP employees feel works most effectively.

"Best-in-class projects at BP fell into a very defined range of having between 20 and 35 percent collaborative space," says Pierz. "With more than 35 percent collaborative space, occupants tend to feel it's wasteful. With less than 20 percent, they feel the space is not productive."

Finding "The Zone"

BP's research revealed that the collaborative space KPI has a critical efficiency counterpart: the total sf per person. Ideally, a best-of-class facility provides between 200 and 250 sf per person. These measurements guide planning for both new and renovated spaces at BP, assuring that work environments are within the optimal range for each KPI, or what Pierz refers to as "The Zone."

If a business unit wants to design a new space, BP's facility staff first researches how the group works. If it's a traditional work group, they'll aim for 25 percent collaborative space, roughly in the middle of the optimal range. As the planning proceeds and workstations or conference rooms are added or removed, the planners work to keep the sf per person and the collaborative space percentage within the zone.

"Currently we have a lot of spaces at 350 sf per person with very little collaborative space. We can present these business units with an opportunity to reduce their costs and improve the productivity of their work group. We do that by putting in some of these innovative meeting areas like small cafes so that during the day people can have a collision with another person and generate ideas," says Pierz.

Turning KPIs into Effective Space

An ARCHIBUS system tracks BP's facilities portfolio by region, state, city, campus, and building down to the floor level. The ARCHIBUS system tracks all the centrally managed office locations in BP's Western Hemisphere (Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago). Spaces at facilities managed by individual business units have not been added.

"It was not cost justified to add these smaller facilities," says Pierz.

The system's Web interface offers a dynamic view of the company's facilities, allowing a user to "drill down" through these levels to specific areas of specific properties. Planners can plot the amount of collaborative space, individual space, and support space, taking out the building vertical penetration space and calculating the relative percentages.

"You can show people where their vacant space is and, even if it is in small pockets, you can generate a project by re-stacking those vacant spaces and putting them into a contiguous block," says Pierz.

The CAFM system also allows BP to keep better track of vacant space, which has the corollary effect of reducing the need to lease additional space.

"It's an excellent tool for helping the users understand what they have," says Pierz, noting that this is particularly helpful during yearly rent discussions.

Since the implementation of the new CAFM/KPI system, the majority of the work has been generated by moves. Pierz points out that the system also has the potential to be used proactively. For example, if a business unit wants to relocate from Houston to Chicago, they can search for vacant space in one of BP's Chicago buildings and work with the facility mangers there, rather than leasing new space.

Similarly, since the ARCHIBUS system enables BP to plot KPIs both by business unit and by building, planners can perform a simple gap analysis enabling them to prioritize the work. Individual business units have to fund the construction, but Pierz points out that if they don't have the money in their budget, the work waits until the next re-stack.

"In that case, we use the effectiveness KPI as a solid metric to design the new," says Pierz.

Since implementing the KPIs, BP has constructed approximately 30,000 sf and currently has approximately 300,000 sf in design and construction (to be completed over the course of 2002 and 2003).

Setting Up the Solution

After the merger and Arco acquisition, BP was operating in seven geographical regions using a variety of FM systems, everything from sophisticated software to traditional hanging files. The solution needed to do three things: integrate the existing CAD and CAFM portfolio, provide a Web interface and, critically, have consistent definitions for space types like workstations, circulation space, and collaboration space.

BP selected ARCHIBUS as its CAFM system because the Amoco organization had already standardized on that system. A few locations were using other systems in isolated areas, but the majority of BP locations were either on ARCHIBUS or they didn't have a CAFM system.

"In a way, this was fortunate because we didn't have to undo something, and there wasn't a built-in resistance to going to ARCHIBUS," says Pierz.

BP brought in Computerized Facility Integration (CFI), a system integration company based in Detroit, to install the correct hardware at each facility, build the Web pages, and integrate the ARCHIBUS system onto BP's servers and link it to the CAD drawings.

The process of converting the drawing data to AutoCAD and integrating it with ARCHIBUS took approximately nine months. For the Chicago and Houston areas, the majority of the data was already in CAD format and was collected in three to four months. The Arco data needed to be scanned in from hard copy drawings and converted to AutoCAD. After the drawings were converted to CAD, all floor plates were polylined to include BOMA measuring conventions.

The drawings also needed to have space-type categorizations added (individual, collaborative, and support). This included actually walking the floors to verify the accuracy of the drawings. For this business intelligence, as well as for overall project management, BP turned to Johnson Controls Workplace Services, to whom they had outsourced the FM and project management services.

"We have some great internal BP staff, but we just didn't have the expertise we needed to run this kind of project," says Pierz.

Measurement standards are also of critical importance because BP will roll this system out globally after the U.S. integration is completed. Pierz notes that a pilot of the system is currently underway in BP's UK facilities.

Measuring Employee Attitude

In addition to creating workplace councils that conduct surveys of building occupants, BP has partnered with Gensler Consulting to conduct post-occupancy surveys for all new spaces at six months and one year after the project is complete.

"Many times we're going from a closed office environment to an open and collaborative work environment, and part of that change process includes some initial resistance in the first six months," says Pierz. "After six months, the reaction to the new types of space is generally favorable."

By Lee Ingalls