How is your company responding to the ever-changing needs of the FM world?

At FOS of CannonDesign, we understand the value of Facility Condition Assessments (FCAs) and their role in strategic planning for our clients. That's why we developed the FOScore® Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) module — a first-of-its-kind tool to provide facility management teams with the ability to understand the total cost of ownership of assets over a 50-year outlook, giving facility managers a dynamic solution that can be used to keep facility data up to date and inform tactical decision making.

What product innovations is your company working on that will help facility managers be more successful in their roles?

Institutions face significant cyclical investment needs throughout the life of their facilities, in addition to expanding deferred maintenance backlogs. Combined with ongoing space needs, balancing new construction and investments in existing infrastructure represents a significant challenge. FOS works with facility managers to improve the long-term understanding of facility renewal and deferred maintenance needs by implementing process enhancements and integrating existing software platforms with our robust FOScore® Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Module. This tool is powerful yet flexible; default values can be set at the module and portfolio/site/building type levels, while asset-specific values can be entered for one-time or yearly recurring costs. Facility managers determine what level of detail is appropriate for their teams to get the best ROI in data collection and analysis. In addition to data grids that can be exported, interactive visuals are available to further illustrate TCO over time. 
 
TCO allows organizations to predict capital investment plan outcomes and intelligently target, prioritize, and optimize hundreds of millions of dollars of annual spending. Making smart decisions for your facilities should be centered on data-driven insights. The FOScore® TCO Module helps organizations gather and analyze facility data to make informed choices.

How is your company/product changing/improving the FM industry?

Our primary software, FOScore®, enables both our in-house assessment teams as well as our clients (including building owners, architects, engineers, and property managers) to document a current state of understanding of building conditions. With the ability to report, strategize, and plan capital improvements, FOScore® provides robust visualizations of data sets that empower our clients to further advance infrastructure goals. Quite simply, the FOScore® platform helps understand, advocate, and prepare our clients for the future in the challenging arena of asset stewardship.

Tell us your "why" in the FM world.

Here at FOS, we work with facility managers every day. It’s helped us stay in the loop about how assessment methodologies are quickly changing — and why suitability of facilities is of the upmost importance. Suitability refers to how well a particular building fits the specific needs it was intended for, and this “fit” is like the superhero of your facility world. Suitability isn’t just some minor detail. It plays a vital role in optimizing functionality, boosting productivity, ensuring safety, and even makes sure users of the space are satisfied.

We also understand that the full scope of work for FMs is wide, but the overall goal is the same: to ensure all elements of operation are in order to keep spaces optimized, safe, and productive. A big part of achieving that goal is conducting facility condition assessments (FCAs). At FOS, we’ve embraced the importance of adapting to this changing FM landscape and in response have enhanced our FOScore® FCA and capital planning software with an agile suitability module.