Leading FM Expert Reveals How To Secure Maintenance Revenue And Save Thousands In Cost With SFG20

Leading FM expert, David Hemming CEng FICE FCMI FIWFM gives his thoughts on the potential for SFG20 in the NHS and wider public sector to secure maintenance revenue and save thousands of pounds in cost. 

Who is David Hemming CEng FICE FCMI FIWFM?

A Civil Engineer with more than 30 years working across Military, Government, Higher Education and the NHS, David Hemming has been the Director of Estates and Facilities for a number of high-profile institutions, delivering annual budgets in excess of £350 million. 

Holding Fellowships in both the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management, David sits on a number of national and international committees and advisory groups, dealing with standards, compliance, procurement and sustainability. 

Tackling roles as unique as Managing Director of the Parliamentary Estate, David now works as a Consultant, and is currently helping the NHS deliver the New Hospital Programme, among other major projects.  

What value has SFG20 brought you? 

"With tools like SFG20 using accurate building information, along with modern CAFM systems or IWMS systems, you can take a BIM model and take the data out of it in a structured way and readily identify the work required and the tasks required, and then potentially even cost that.  

You can cost decisions through SFG20 and make value judgments when you are looking at different approaches to building services. 

Proper value can be considered because you can look at the holistic cost of what certain design decisions would be to maintain. 

In value engineering, you are looking to reduce your cost, but not the value that the asset gives you. 

It's no good just reducing a capital cost, if the item that is used to replace it is more energy intensive, or it has a shorter life cycle because it will be more costly to maintain during its life. 

All you're doing is transferring value out of the decision because you're just looking at pure capital costs and not looking at the revenue cost.  

With SFG20, you can look at modelling different solutions for the building services.  

So, it's not just a choice of what the designer would really love to deliver. It's actually looking at the impacts of those decisions on the operation and maintenance side of things, which isn't always considered. 

SFG20 can be used as a tool to get you that complete understanding of the lifecycle costs because you know the scheduled maintenance elements and with a level of analysis you can attribute a cost to that activity." 

What sort of cost savings will SFG20 bring?

"It is thousands and thousands of pounds worth because there really isn't an equivalent to the schedules that SFG20 developed over the last, 20-30 years.  

To do it yourself you would have to be going back to first principles, trying to find references and build up a schedule. 

It would probably be very disproportionate to the value you would get from just using SFG20. 

And to be honest, those that operate and maintain estates aren't normally heavily involved in the design and construction phase of a new building.  

Yes, they may have been consulted, but some of these design decisions aren't run through them, and nobody really is looking at lifecycle costings.  

They talk about it and obviously the public sector is now directed under the IPA Project Routemap to look at whole life costs.  

But again, those techniques and those skills aren't readily understood, and the right people aren't necessary in the room at the time."

What do you think the potential of a tool like this is for the NHS, which has a vast maintenance backlog? 

"Currently the NHS use the Premises Assurance Model when they [the board of each trust] look at assurance.   

However, there doesn’t seem to be a huge correlation between this tool and the level of investment into addressing their backlog.    

They could benefit having a more directed tool to really understand their resources and their finances to say this is what we need to get on top of it. 

They should be doing five-year maintenance plans which look at year on year expenditure. What should it cost to do the planned maintenance? What should it cost us to do lifecycle replacement? 

This is important because if you're doing asset management well and you've integrated tools like SFG20 into CAFM systems, asset management systems, enterprise asset management systems etc, then you should have a clear horizon of when you need to undertake tasks, what it's likely to cost and the risks involved by not doing it. 

This is important because it gives you a rich risk picture that you can then use to brief the decision makers about finances and resources."

What do you think is the value of having a standard? 

"Doing things in a standardised way is invaluable to being able to plan what is a limited resource.  

Whether that's human resource and the hours involved in undertaking work and looking at the cost and expense items. 

Approaching that it in a standardised way and therefore doing a procurement/investment strategy that is linked to that, can save you thousands and thousands of pounds." 

Is investing in data and digitisation tools such as SFG20 worth it?

"One part of this is: how big is your estate? How complex is it? And as soon as you get to a level of complexity with multiple decisions to be made, investments in data and digitisation are really going to pay themselves back in the long term.  

Now in the short term, you're going to have to make an investment in terms of getting the right data and having a structured way of getting that data, but once you have that data and then you have the tools, you can use that data multiple times through these tools.  

And now most of these tools are becoming interactive and they will integrate and therefore you get data going bi-directionally between platforms which means you can look at different scenarios and different models to refine your decision making." 

Did you have anything else you wanted to say specifically about the scope of SFG20? 

"SFG20 is a is a tool like any other tool, and tools need to be used appropriately. You shouldn't use a chisel as a screwdriver! 

Having people that properly understand the tool and how it should be used, makes it a much stronger, better tool that you drive proper productivity out of. 

A lot of people have adopted SFG20 but haven’t necessarily done the training, understood how they need to use it and how it interfaces with their CAFM system, their IWMS system, and the other tools they have. They're not getting the full benefit from it.  

Time and effort spent up front training, creating greater awareness and building detailed processes around it will save them huge amounts of time and probably money in the long run."