Quality Facility Management: A Marketing and Customer Service Approach

As a facility manager, you're concerned with building quality into your operation but possibly unsure about how to go about it in a systematic way. Perhaps it's because a Total Quality Management program seems too imposing and costly for your department to undertake. Or maybe you're leery of certain aspects of such a concerted effort, like measuring quality or marketing facility services, because they've never been adequately explained to you.

Possessing considerable backgrounds in facility management, Stormy Friday and Dave Cotts understand these uncertainties. In Quality Facility Management, they have pooled their knowledge and experience to develop a comprehensive resource that demystifies the quality movement and shows you how to apply the old-fashioned but enduring commonsense principles of quality management often overshadowed by TQM.

Flecked with humor and written as if the authors were simply talking to you, this refreshing new book identifies the five major elements underpinning any effective quality facility management program and takes you step by step through each one in a detailed yet accessible way. Gradually, you learn how to put these elements all together and―by incorporating selected modern techniques―devise a program to meet your specific situation.

With the help of real-world examples, checklists, and other how-to aids, Quality Facility Management reveals:

• Why customers must be the driving force behind your quality effort, how you can exceed customers' performance expectations, and how you can effectively recover from service mistakes
• How quality facility management has its roots in TQM, what constitutes the major aspects of a TQM program, and how you can implement quality facility management without a full-blown TQM program
• Which aspects of your operation need to be measured and evaluated, which measuring tools should be used, and how to get your customers involved in the measurement process
• How to develop a facility marketing plan that increases awareness of your services, improves your image as a provider, and acts as an "insurance policy" in retaining the support of senior management in the face of organizational upheaval
• How to engineer a program of continuous quality improvement by assuming a specific leadership role, empowering frontline staff, instituting effective customer service training, and partnering with vendors

The final chapter provides a bounty of practical case histories of companies that are realizing quality facility management right now, including major organizations like Celestica, Bell Atlantic, Hewlett-Packard, and Lockheed. Here, you'll find ample evidence of quality tools and strategies at work―from interior preventive maintenance crews to staff productivity improvements, infrastructure planning teams to customer satisfaction programs.

Indeed, whether you're in the public or private sector, in a large or small facility, part of an in-house organization or a contracted firm, Quality Facility Management enables you to plan, organize, staff, direct, and evaluate for quality, so that you maximize your department's responsiveness to customers and your value to top management.

Quality facility management is the only way to do business.

Here's the only way to do quality facility management.

Facility managers want to answer the call for quality but many feel they don't have the resources or guidance to make it an essential feature of their operation. Total Quality Management programs require too much of them and various aspects of the quality effort, whether it's quality measurement or facility marketing, seem hard to carry out or even beside the point.

Finally there's a sensible guide that enables you to build quality into your department simply by applying basic, old-fashioned quality principles and selected modern techniques―Quality Facility Management

With the assistance of examples, checklists, and other handy tools, this invigorating resource reveals the five key aspects of quality facility management and shows you how to bring them all together to develop a program that fits your particular circumstances.

Emphasizing why your customers are the driving force behind your quality efforts, Quality Facility Management helps you:

• Surpass customers' performance expectations and recover effectively from even the most damaging mistakes
• Provide quality facility management without implementing a formal TQM program
• Accurately measure critical aspects of your operation and act effectively on that feedback
• Devise a facility marketing plan that enhances your department's image with customers and top management
• Put a program of continuous quality improvement into effect through leadership, staff training and empowerment, vendor collaborations, and other proven means

Packed with case studies of facility managers who are building quality into their operation, Friday and Cotts's Quality Facility Management illustrates how your quest for quality can dramatically upgrade customer and senior management satisfaction―without draining department resources.

A former practicing facility manager, STORMY FRIDAY is President ofThe Friday Group in Alexandria, Virginia, which providesmanagement, marketing, and facilities services to commercialbusiness and government. She lectures extensively worldwide onfacility management issues.

DAVID G. COTTS is Chief of Building Maintenance and Repair for TheWorld Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. He is a past presidentof IFMA and also teaches facility management at George WashingtonUniversity.