We all know facility managers are in a never-ending battle. We wear many hats, and it seems like someone is always trying to give us another hat to wear. Generally, the work our staff performs goes unnoticed because it is our job to assure the facility runs smoothly. Then there is the constant question, “How can we do it for less money?”
All of us have seen our share of facility successes. All of us have seen our share of issues. All of us have seen facility expansions and facility contractions. We have had to face cutbacks in budgets, headcount, or both. We have had to look for ways to make that chiller last one more year, or patch that roof one more time, or hold off on buying that new piece of equipment for the staff for one more year.
All of us are survivors. We know the job is not getting easier. Too often, the decision-makers of our organizations view the facilities we manage as a necessary evil, or that spending money on facilities is just the cost of doing business. At times, we feel like we are on an island, and nobody can see life through the facility manager.
Well, now we have the opportunity to change that. We have the opportunity to support each other because we know what life is like in the era of “Do more with less.” We have the opportunity to share our collective knowledge and experience to meet the challenge of managing our facilities with dwindling resources. We have the collective knowledge to meet the challenge of managing our facilities with the Facility Managers Alliance.
We have a vehicle to share issues and success stories. We can discuss products we have used that have helped our facilities, or we can raise a red flag with respect to products/services that have not delivered and, therefore, caution others before they go down the same path we did.
We can help each other enter the age of e-commerce. We can use each other as sounding boards before we take that request for funds to our management for approval.
We cannot always predict our schedules. There will be times we will miss a meeting. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to capture the essence of the meeting you couldn’t attend? Wouldn’t if be nice to receive a newsletter each month dedicated to local facility issues that has solutions developed by local facility managers? Facility Management & Engineering, Inc., a local company out of Newburgh, would like to e-mail each month, free of charge, to the Facility Manager Alliance members, such a newsletter. Our aim is to generate a monthly newsletter that contains short, fact-filled, “how-to” articles on the subject of facility management. In addition to these informative articles, we’d like to include:
- Facility Managers Alliance meeting minutes
- Local success stories
- Facility-related websites
- Results of local surveys conducted
- Pending legislation (local, state, and federal)
- Answers posed by members
- Classified section — i.e., sell surplus equipment
Facility Management & Engineering, Inc. offers to serve as the facilitator for this effort. We see the newsletter, titled “The Facility Manager,” as a great opportunity for the local facility management community to come together, share our collective knowledge, and help each other perform our roles “better, faster cheaper” than we have been able to do to date.