Facility auditing: A comprehensive guide to evaluating your building's performance

Posted on Aug 12, 2023 at 03:08 PM

Today's routine facility audits are necessary in any company or enterprise because nothing lasts forever.

Over time facilities or installations change, and management needs to assess and audit the state of its physical facilities. Regardless of whether those facilities are new or have been running for a while, institutions should consider the subject of auditing. 

Our next article provides a quick look at everything you need to know about the auditing of the facilities. Follow us.

What is the concept of facility auditing?

Facility auditing is a regular auditing tool or detailed analysis system for the entire physical area of an enterprise and its infrastructure. To include resources, buildings, equipment, and other devices required. To ensure the smooth operation of facilities to provide support and services to individuals.

The auditing also includes staff and applicable policies, all of which aim to identify areas that need planning, managing, auditing, and improving to ensure the most efficiency and quality of the building's operation.

Auditing is a standard way of gaining essential information necessary to understand the current state of the facilities. Besides its role of assisting in the valuation of the current asset's cash value and, if required. 

The cost of its replacement foreseeing future industrial operations, maintenance, and procurement costs.

Auditing systems include research, surveys, feedback, and inspection.

Outside contractors usually carry these out with good knowledge of all issues related to the facilities management career and spend several days on-site to gather the required information about the organisation's current situation and make the best suggestions for improvement.

It takes less than two weeks to complete the process, depending on the number of individuals involved in the auditing.

After this, the service provider gives the final results in the form of reports identifying the recommendations required to improve the quality of facilities according to their findings during each stage of the evaluation process.

Why is facility auditing crucial?

Facility scrutiny highlights its importance in identifying all possible problems in the workspace. For example, the manager's office may be small and need to move to a larger office or staff in a single office. Thus must add or separate more offices.

Here are some of the other reasons that illustrate the importance of auditing the facility's facilities:

• It helps create a workspace inventory to ensure that none of its lost elements are.

• It allows the identification of areas where some health risks, such as rot, may arise.

• Allows identification of any risks related to occupational security and safety. to ensure the safety of employees, such as broken glass or edges of sharp furniture pieces.

• It allows for identifying any environmental risks, such as poor air quality that may cause mould germs.
  
  

What are the steps of conducting a facility auditing?

The auditing of facilities prepares under the following basic steps:

• Preparation phase:

The establishment of the work plan begins with the identification of service delivery points, and the approval of senior auditing officers is then taken by the departments to prepare and verify a list of all facilities that need scrutiny within the organisation, from offices, infrastructure, equipment, materials, staff, services, etc.

Auditing follows international laws and key domestic documents that clarify all the activities permitted with the need to follow; they can only operate on permits from the country where the operations occur.

The plan should follow up, and a list of items requiring oversight or inspection should be drawn up, with indicative questions for the collective discussion and the team responsible for conducting the auditing and the tool needed.

The team should be trained on the tool, and service providers should be guided on the auditing process. The device should be field tested and checklists improved. 

To identify facility management KPIs used to perform auditing tasks.

• Auditing procedure:

The aim of the auditing process needs to be articulated so that everyone understands their roles and works together to achieve them. 

The service provider must provide all relevant files, records, and equipment for inspection.

Therefore, the actual auditing process begins through physical verification of infrastructure and availability of materials, personnel, equipment, etc., as well as official records.

Later, citizens' and society's views gather through group debates focusing on their experiences with the services provided. To analyse those data and summarise the results, prepare the auditing report, and develop recommendations based on those views.

• Listening and endorsement:

After finalising the final auditing report, it must take part in a public hearing involving members of the community and service providers whose services have been audited, with the need for senior government officials from the public authorities concerned to be able to make actual decisions according to the reports provided to improve services and facilities.

Paving the way for new demands and correction of existing services.

• Scaling up operations:

Utility auditing improves other public services by developing and replicating them with service providers. 

But it requires a trained team capable of facilitating the process. This, in turn, requires high skills to analyse the information generated by auditing. 

When integrating the tool with the regular activities of service providers, they can achieve a sustainable auditing process.

What are the advantages and challenges of facility auditing?

The most crucial advantage of facility auditing is developing an expanded database describing the status of all existing enterprise establishments and facilities.

All that assist facility management providers in improving services, including staffing, infrastructure, equipment, etc. Other benefits of facility auditing include some:

• Enabling staff to know what services they are entitled to.

• Strengthening relations between society and service providers.

• He drew attention to weaknesses in current services and infrastructure.

• Cost-effective operation.

• Easy to adopt with more facilities.

The obstacles and challenges to the implementation of the facilities' auditing are:

• Many checklists get limited or comprehensive, which only allows for unique and high-level auditing of facilities that need monitoring.

• Long or accurate reviews need enough training and preparation time before they start. Facilities management training courses in Dubai can cover this.

• Inadequate knowledge by auditing service providers of the services provided by the company to the customer. so they will not be able to disclose the actual reality of the company.

• Failure to support the delivery of practical services by service providers fear of blame for the poor services provided by the company to the public.

In Conclusion,

Developing a facility auditing system is a quality standard for companies and their affiliates, and auditing is an accurate process that needs a lot of time and effort to complete. it is easy to lose sight of any details that may prove crucial. Hence, accuracy needs to be investigated when working on it.