Albert Manshum has a sharp eye for potential, and an uncompromising adherence to his vision. He is the senior vice president of operations, integration, and optimization for Advocate Health Care, the largest health system in Illinois with 15 million square feet of space, including 12 hospitals with more than 3,300 beds. 

In 2010, while he was the vice president of construction for Advocate, he had a realization that would completely alter the structure and philosophy driving facility operations at Advocate, according to an article on the FacilitiesNet website.

At the time, he had responsibility over construction activities across the system, as well as its office buildings. He chaired what he calls a facility council, gathering the operations leaders for each facility on a monthly basis to talk about what they were doing at their facilities.

“I started to realize that we were not making progress on facilities,” Manshum said. He had sites that were doing great things, but also a lot of sites that weren’t “moving the needle very much,” and weren’t taking the best practices they heard about from the more successful facilities back to their own. 

In particular, he was concerned that more wasn’t being done across the system on the sustainability and energy efficiency front. “So I went to our COO and said I would like to centralize the energy component of facilities, so that we could begin moving the needle,” he said.

Read the article.