Bringing up facilities management (FM) to oil and gas company management could elicit little more than, “You are talking to the wrong person.” The fact is that FM activities are critical to efficient operations.

FM is a complex multidisciplinary set of activities that – when expertly handled with standardized processes, methodologies, and the right automation – exerts a powerful and positive impact on the bottom line.

Best practices are the key
It is becoming more apparent to oil and gas companies that FM applies to each structure across the corporate spectrum, not just to office buildings. FM encompasses facility diversity from laboratories to refineries, to creating brand-new cities out of nowhere, and through the life cycle from engineering and construction to daily operations.

For offices, the functions carried out by the staff that will occupy the building help define the footprint, workstation requirements, or support areas.

Sprawling global complexity calls for an approach more attuned to today’s technological era than to yesteryear’s “find us some office space.” In streamlining and automating best practices to achieve business objectives, however, companies must keep in mind the slogan that has gained increasing credence in the corporate world: “Tools are cool, but processes rule.”

The upshot of this concept is that technology must be used to enable business processes. Rather than buying into bells and whistles, a company with a solid approach to FM focuses on making business operations work most effectively in a standardized best approach.

In streamlining and automating best practices, companies should do two things:
1. Determine the optimum practice for a specific functional area, such as space management, maintenance management, or tenant services such as conference and food; and

2. Determine how the optimum practice can be standardized to work across the company’s entire operation, which for larger oil and gas organizations usually is global.

Accomplishing these objectives allows companies to focus on working well and
consistently, which is the purpose of standardizing best practices across FM.

FM life cycle impacts bottom line
Within the range of structures from offices to refineries, early in the life cycle FM must work with broader company management to determine the optimal solution to meet their
requirements (essentially, those of the operating unit). At refineries, for example, safety issues dominate (such as blast zone requirements).

For offices, the functions carried out by the staff that will occupy the building help define the footprint, workstation requirements, or support areas.

Within the discipline of R&D, laboratories dominate design and maintenance activities.

On the operational side of the life cycle, determinations must be made regarding maintenance requirements for the assets (i.e., how to keep equipment properly operating), whether workspace is high-impact, and if special certifications are required (e.g., for flammables or corrosives).

Therefore, the life cycle begins with technical assessments and includes logistics involved in moving people and equipment as well as allocating costs in terms of charge-backs or reimbursements.

Analyses are geared toward attaining optimum operating conditions for the space so those generating revenue have what they need to work efficiently. This further opens the window for company leadership and management to recognize why they should be interested in FM in the first place. Whether operations are upstream or downstream, FM
has a decisive bottom-line impact on the company’s overall capabilities to find, produce, and deliver product to the marketplace in the most streamlined way possible.

Functional requirements are focused on business requirements, including how they are collected and implemented. In optimizing the way company personnel work, FM need-to-know specifics can include:
• If the space is an office building or call center, considerable work space, desks, IT, and telephony are necessary;
• If services are associated to a non-operating surplus asset, safety, and binding liability are key activities during reclamation activities; and
• If a frontier site is being developed, logistics, staff and expat housing, and fundamental operating services become critical.

At this stage, FM must get the requisite details documented so space can be built appropriately. The application of consistent best practices ensures that critical activities are executed properly to transform FM from a reactive activity to a more logical and comprehensive one. Establishing more predictable asset life cycles allows company management to spend more time on strategic issues.

Technology’s role
At this juncture, companies can look at how technology should be selected and implemented to automate the best processes across the FM life cycle. In the first broad stage of activities, the business processes are streamlined and clearly defined. Once this is accomplished, automation can be deployed to drive better use of resources and access to better metrics for decision-making.

The key to technology is that it is a business-driven activity. The role of IT is to ensure potential selection will work within the corporate infrastructure, but only FM personnel know what the technology must do.

In technology tool selection, companies can use information collected in the functional stage for either a request for proposal or outright vendor selection.

Following through with the consistency theme, the key is to understand from a business
perspective what the tool must do to allow it to best support the business – and that is the execution stage.

Field applications
How does this play out in today’s global oil and gas industry? In the case of a major operator with a large international portfolio, FM can be critical. While a company’s facilities may be well managed, if each region is employing a different management style, a problem arises. For example, variability in management creates a significant problem when it negatively impacts the company’s ability to conduct benchmarking due to the lack of consistency across the portfolio. Although the operator in this case believed it was managing more space with fewer dollars, it was unable to say why one region’s costs were lower than another’s. The major operator discovered significant new return on investment by standardizing and automating its processes.

Another major operator experienced parallel success and used process standardization supported by automation to drive standard practices into the field.

Having best practices to promote and a proven ability to cut costs while enhancing
services allowed the company to convince operating units to transfer control of facilities to the FM organization.

In essence, the operator gained a marketing advantage. Now the FM organization can reach out to the field with the message of how FM improves site operations, how metrics compared before and after the FM organization took control, and what advantages the individual operating units gain by having an FM organization take over their facilities management.

Streamlined, automated, improved
Streamlining and automating best practices across the FM life cycle delivers results. With tedious and labor-intensive activities transferred to FM specialists, operating units can focus on their core business.

For the corporation, having standardized FM delivery capability allows management to look across the entire portfolio and compare metrics on an apples-to-apples basis, drives down operational costs, and allows the FM organization to provide the right type of facility for the required function at the right price.