By Healthcare Facilities Today

Bethesda, MD — FM BENCHMARKING, the largest global online benchmarking tool for facilities managers and corporate real estate professionals, today announced a major new contract—one  of the largest health plans in the United States will be using FM BENCHMARKING to benchmark its facilities operations for over 1,000 of its facilities. Facility benchmarking can be expected to improve its facility operations and drive down its facility operating costs significantly.

The health plan comprises a wide variety of both medical and non-medical facilities that will be benchmarked. The former includes facilities for ambulatory surgery, clinics, hospitals, mental health, and MRI / imaging. Its non-medical facilities include offices, call centers, parking structures and warehousing / storage. This will make FM BENCHMARKING the largest benchmarking database serving medical and health care facilities.

Operations for the following areas will be benchmarked: Utilities, maintenance, janitorial, security, waste management, landscaping and grounds. Going beyond traditional benchmarking to identify whether a facility is over or underperforming others, FM BENCHMARKING will be applied to study which best practices have been implemented in facilities that are outperforming others, so it can determine which initiatives should improve operations in those facilities. Besides applying FM BENCHMARKING's general metrics, the health plan's benchmarking solution will incorporate FM BENCHMARKING's specialized metrics and reports designed for medical and healthcare facilities.

FM BENCHMARKING was selected not only because of its comprehensive approach to benchmarking facilities, but to its ability to customize its application to benchmark medical facilities, as well as its unique best practices analysis, which provides specifics on which facility initiatives to implement that have been proven to reduce operating costs.

"We are very excited about working with this prestigious client," said FM BENCHMARKING Principal, Peter S. Kimmel, IFMA Fellow, "which has demonstrated its leadership role in high quality facility benchmarking in the healthcare industry." Kimmel also said that FM BENCHMARKING's success in healthcare benchmarking not only will enable it to benchmark medical facilities of other healthcare organizations, but demonstrates the ease with which its application can accommodate the specialized metrics of other vertical arenas, such as retail, hotels and educational facilities

FM BENCHMARKING's Premium Edition is a global subscription-based service that provides facilities management and real estate professionals with a unique way of benchmarking their building data and applying that information to improve operational efficiencies, reduce their carbon footprint, and identify best practices. 

The QUERY version offers the reports from the Premium system with the exception of Best Practices. It does not require any data input by the user, so it is very easy to get up and running.

FM BENCHMARKING will soon announce its Starter Edition, which is similar to Premium, but with just a few of the data fields to be input. It is designed to get those just starting benchmarking get up to speed quickly so that they can take advantage of benchmarking their facilities. Users of this edition will be able to migrate upward to the Premium Edition.

FM BENCHMARKING benchmarks facilities all over the world. It automatically converts building metrics and currencies to the units of choice for users, regardless of location.

The typical company using the methodology in the Premium system has experienced a 31% reduction in operating costs and a 40% decrease in energy consumption over a ten-year period.

For more information, see the Web site (www.fmbenchmarking.com).