One of the easy ways to understand how your facilities are operating is to know a few key facilities benchmarks. The first ingredient in the analysis is utilized in all of these calculations, how many gross square feet are your buildings or campus. How do you figure this out if you do not know it off the top of your head? Gross square feet (GSF) is defined as the sum of all areas on all floors of a building included within the outside faces of its exterior walls, including all vertical penetration areas, for circulation and shaft areas that connect one floor to another.
As an example for a simple building that is 50 feet long, 25 feet wide and three story high with no open two story foyers you take 50 times 25 times 3 and you get 3,750 gross square feet.
With the gross square feet knowledge, you can do a couple quick calculations. How much are you spending to maintain your facilities, divide this figure by the gross square feet.
Do we have enough maintenance people to maintain our facilities? Determine how many maintenance Full Time Equivalents (FTE) you have and then you divide your gross square footage by this number to see this ratio. The same is true for cleaning. Knowing your cleaning FTE’s you can divide your GSF by this number and see how that compares.
The last key benchmark is knowing your utility consumption by how many British Thermal Units (BTU’s) (which is the common calculation for utility usage) you are consuming. Divide this number by your gross square foot.
Knowing these figures will prepare you to be able to talk with others who have your job and you can compare or you can ask the Stone House Group to review these figures and interpret the findings for you.