As a direct result of implementing a Technical Management Program (TMP), those three functions were brought in-house, saving the client $200,000 a year. Substantial gains in efficiency and productivity allowed the client to increase its assets by nearly 60 percent to 950,000 sf without requiring additional facilities personnel to manage the space, a cost avoidance of approximately $230,000. EMCOR also is handling 21 percent more work orders and a 20 percent increase in R&D laboratory process support with the same 15 technicians as before. Remaining third-party vendors also have been brought on board with TMP, increasing productivity and accountability at their own companies.

“Our customer wanted to implement life cycle processes,” says Terri Melzer, vice president of EMCOR Facilities Services. “They are in a critical environment, their buildings are getting older, and things were starting not to function as well as they used to. They were becoming concerned about the long-term operation of their facilities. Our job was to turn over every rock and look at every process in order to develop a way of doing business that is scalable and empowers the users.”

In many cases that meant tweaking processes and programs that already were in place. Sometimes, it meant starting from scratch.

“None of the processes were documented, and we never took a look at productivity measures before,” says Todd Robertson, director of Engineering and Technical Services for EMCOR Facilities Services. “We responded to key performance indicators as directed by the customer. We weren’t only looking at our performance, but also at critical equipment downtime and work order completion.”

It was essential to commit the necessary resources from the very beginning in order to get the job done right, says Melzer. EMCOR assigned a project manager to make sure the company stayed on track with this project as well as its primary responsibility to the client.

Know Your Starting Point

The first task was to conduct a detailed gap analysis to compare what the operation looks like initially and what they wanted it to look like ultimately. That included examining staffing levels and skill sets, organizational structure, span of control within the hierarchy, insourcing vs. outsourcing, work flow, tools and technology, data capture at the ground level, and performance metrics to move the improvement forward.

At the core of the reengineering is the TMP, which outlines the rules by which EMCOR conducts its business. For example, every technician on every work order must account for his or her labor hours and material dollars, which is data the company needs to establish how effectively it delivers its service. The problem wasn’t that the technicians weren’t working hard; it was that they couldn’t account for the work they were doing. Too often, they would be corralled by a client asking them to do a task for them, which the technician did not want to ignore. There was no work order associated with the job, but it clearly took up the technician’s time.

Each technician is assigned a handheld Syclo device to record the work item and the amount of time it took.

“These guys were classifying 40 percent of their work as ‘miscellaneous,’” explains Robertson. “This is not an effort to bird-dog their activities. We want to take on additional scope, while adding value and driving productivity, and not cut jobs.”

The tactic has proven successful. In addition to all of the client’s operations and maintenance, janitorial, and landscaping, EMCOR is now responsible for all management, design work, and processing support, as well.

EMCOR has always issued handheld devices to their technicians, but they changed the way they were used. All low- to moderate-priority work is now directly dispatched from Syclo to Maximo®, the company’s computerized maintenance management system. Every work order issued by a technician costs about $6 less than those generated by the customer. If the customer does need to report a problem, they are taught to do it online rather than by phone, which also costs less.

At the same time, they optimized employee access to Maximo® in order to save the client money. The company must buy a separate license for each person who uses Maximo®, and many were grossly underutilizing the tool, says Robertson. The only person who now has direct access to Maximo is the maintenance planner.

EMCOR even looked at its own relationship with the client, and renegotiated fees to the client’s advantage. For example, EMCOR had always charged a flat monthly fee to operate the client’s off-site call center.

“The customer loved it,” says Robertson. “Then we took a hard look at it and realized we could save them $30,000 a year if they paid by the work order.”

The comprehensive TMP also includes business management, maintenance administration, and work management programs with detailed end-to-end workflow, standard operating procedures, and local operating procedures for every aspect of work. All technicians and third-party service providers are now trained to use the system and were required to sign off on the protocols. All life safety processes—including inspections, personal safety, environmental compliance, and permitting—are now fully documented, as well.

EMCOR also catalogued the client’s assets, including model, serial number, and warranty data, and optimized the preventive maintenance plan. They already had in place a bare-bones, baseline program based on RS Means™. They augmented it by tracking the failures on the 28-year-old equipment and implementing a predictive maintenance plan that included infrared and vibration testing on the most expensive and mission-critical systems.

The ratio of preventive maintenance to corrective maintenance should be about six to one, says Robertson.

EMCOR conducted a skills analysis for its 15 technicians and provided training for all of them in an effort to optimize personnel. Five core groups were reorganized into three, and the maintenance planner now has no supervisory duties.

Challenges and Lessons

As successful as the reengineering has been, it did not come to pass without challenges. The first was getting the company to commit to dedicating the resources necessary to make this a systematic change in the way they do business rather than a short-term program. Part of that commitment includes training people to utilize the changes once they are implemented.

“These programs can’t be developed and rolled out in a vacuum,” says Robertson. “It can’t be the program of the month. You have to train people, to tell them what you expect, and then measure the results.”

“It’s an ongoing challenge to make sure you communicate what you’re trying to accomplish, and to measure what you are accomplishing and hold people accountable for it,” adds Melzer.

There was a reluctance to change among people who were accustomed to doing their job a certain way.

“It was very beneficial to have a meaningful plan that was detailed and intuitive; to roll it out and articulate it to all stakeholders,” says Robertson.

Even after they got initial buy-in, it was sometimes difficult to maintain the momentum.

“As I backed out as the project manager and tried to wean the account team off, they gravitated back to their comfort zone,” he says. “They were fighting fires every day, dealing with program changes. It was the middle of summer, and we were having record heat waves in Northern California, typical things that we all deal with in our facility management lives.”

Once the programs are in place, it’s critical to establish systems to make sure they keep operating smoothly. Constant communication is one way to achieve that: meet weekly with technicians, and monthly internally and with the customer to review key performance indicators. Communicating with all the stakeholders helps them understand the value of the long-term goal. Data collection is also important, with daily work order backlog review meetings between planners and supervisors to update priorities, quarterly TMP audits, and annual risk and reliability surveys.

“I look at the team today versus the team a year ago, and the sense of ownership is amazing,” says Melzer. “Recently we assigned building owners to give the sense that this is their building. They see successes in another building, and they want to try it, as well.”

TMP is now a foundation of all of EMCOR’s new site-based business.

“This is not a program, it’s the new way of life,” says Melzer. “It’s the way we do business.”

By Lisa Wesel

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ISSN: 1096-4894