Structured Process Improvement in Facilities Management Organisations using the “SPICE FM” Approach

Facilities Management is a newly emerging and fast growing business sector. Currently there is limited research in process improvement in this sector. This paper discusses SPICE FM, a research project, which developed a process improvement framework for FM. The paper explains the SPICE FM framework, research methodology and well as a case study in implementing the framework. Background This paper provides an overview of the SPICE FM research project. SPICE FM sets out to develop a process improvement framework for FM organisations. Facilities Management (FM) is a term, which encompasses a wide range of activities involved in the effective management of built assets. It involves the total management of all services that support the core business of the organisation. Alexander (1996) identified FM as the process by which an organisation ensures that its buildings, systems and services support core operations and processes as well as contribute to achieving strategic objectives in changing conditions. Understanding of process initiative aspects of FM behaviour in particular, remains relatively undeveloped. To date little data is available to assess how extensively the use of process thinking has diffused in FM organisations, what factors have influenced this diffusion, and how they affect the overall organisational performance. To this extent, SPICE FM’s aim was “to develop a structured organisational learning framework for facilities organisations”. It investigated if some of the existing organisational improvement frameworks used in other business sectors could be integrated and tailored to create a comprehensive FM solution. In particular the research investigated two existing frameworks, namely (i) SPICE; and (ii) the Balanced Scorecard. SPICE (Sarshar 2000), is a process improvement framework for construction organisations. However, a shortcoming of SPICE was that the process improvement framework did not have clear links with business strategy and business priorities (Finnemore 2000). SPICE FM attempted to address this shortcoming by integrating SPICE with a major business strategy framework, namely the Balanced Scorecard. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) (Kaplan 1996) is a strategic management framework developed by Harvard University. BSC is a conceptual framework for translating an organisation’s vision into a set of performance indicators distributed among four perspectives: financial, customer, internal business processes and learning and 1 SPICE FM was a two year research project sponsored by EPSRC (Engineering, Physics and Science Research Council) and the DETR (Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions) in the UK.