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Vol 28 - No 07 - September 2002 A Study Survey: Performance Measurement of Industrial Buildings The growth in the use of performance measurement of the operational strategy of organisations, and interest in improving the customer satisfaction amongst construction clients by one of the UK's largest engineering consultants, has provoked a collaborative research project investigating the application of performance measurement to industrial buildings. The research has sought to identify the nature of the tools and techniques required to measure buildings against clients' requirements for strategic and operational performance, and to identify the methods for managing change to meet those requirements. The findings from the review of techniques found little specifically connected to manufacturing buildings, but there was scope for adapting techniques used in the office sector to the more human orientated industrial environments ie.light industrial, electronics assembly. The types of tools available could be broken down into three categories: Post occupancy evaluation... assessment of how the completed building reflected the original design intent, and the evaluation of how to approach change within an existing built environment Matching supply and demand ...matching the provision of existing (or proposed) buildings with the requirements of the occupying organisations Environmental assessment ...assessment of a number of environmental variables related to the building such as CO2 emissions, provision of energy saving equipment, leakage detection, land use, transport provision, use of building materials, service controls and human health considerations. Specific strategic performance measures have also been developed with manufacturing in mind, related to capacity, building condition, and the management of building provision. A eries of preliminary interviews revealed that performance measures for building issues were not regarded as strategically important, and that the lack of information generated by the construction industry on the ways buildings might better support manufacturing has contributed to the perception that buildings are a rather expensive overhead rather than a instrument of business support. The current part of this research, that has been undertaken in association with the Institute of Operations Management, is the identification of a wider set of attitudes to performance measurement of buildings. By building upon the work conducted in the aforementioned interviews, we intend to capture industry beliefs regarding the value added by industrial buildings to add feedback to the original problem of the usefulness of building performance measurement. [1 ]The research project is an EPSRC /IMI funded collaboration between The department of Built and Natural environment at Glasgow Caledonian University, the department of Manufacturing and Engineering Management, University of Strathclyde, Leeds University, and Ove Arup and Partners. For further information contact Mr. G. McDougall on 0141 331 3716, or E-mail g.mcdougall@gcal.ac.uk Page number: 15 Word count: 340 Related Topics:
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