Facilities management is emerging rapidly as a distinct and critical field of study and professional practice for all sectors of the economy. In the past it has tended to be regarded as a service function and subsumed within other areas such as engineering, the built environment and business management. The health sector is an important part of the overall FM industry because it represents a driver of capital works that is both extensive and expensive. The health sector building requirements are growing, demand regular maintenance and upgrading, and are critical to core business. An extensive literature review revealed that there has been minimal published research into the development and implementation of a central feature of effective FM, namely, performance management. Performance management provides the primary evaluation and planning tool for FM, in that it identifies the performance indicators that are meaningful to FM and core business, provides measures for those indicators and enables projective planning and benchmarking to be undertaken. This research study assesses the possibility of developing a comprehensive performance measurement system for FM in the healthcare sector. The research has two main aims: - To identify the knowledge gaps in current FM performance measurement systems in general, and for the healthcare sector in particular. - To investigate the possibility of benchmarking FM performance across the healthcare sector using a weighted assessment across all categories of performance. In order to meet the research purpose and data collection requirements from the relatively limited number of FM experts who specialise in the health sector, the research methodology employs a combination of a case study approach as an exploratory tool, and a phenomenological approach as the main qualitative design. In achieving the aims and objectives, this research helps in improving FM practice in the healthcare sector through: - Providing facility managers with a comprehensive study which highlights the achievements and knowledge gaps in FM and its performance measurement - Providing top management with a study for the effectiveness of developing decision support strategy to make effective and efficient changes to their facility management practices - Facilitate the implementation of benchmarking techniques in the health sector, in order to improve the performance of the healthcare sector FM over time. The study concludes that developing aggregate/collective KPIs for each performance measurement category of possible measure (social/quality, financial, environmental, functional, and technical) is feasible. However, before being able to develop and implement that approach an improvement to the current FM practices is required. The improvement can be achieved via either a voluntarily or compulsory commitment from top management towards FM in the organizations. This commitment should be implemented with an appropriate hierarchy from the bottom to the top. The key components include: establishing the contribution of FM to the success of the overall business in financial terms; setting agreed FM objectives; deriving meaningful general KPIs; defining the data required for each KPI; establishing the system for collecting, analyzing and interpreting the data; and conducting the benchmarking process for continual improvement.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/211438 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Hamwi, Tayfe, Built Environment, Faculty of Built Environment, UNSW |
| Publisher | Publisher:University of New South Wales. Built Environment |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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