4. Facilities Management
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Building your Activity & Attraction Business
4. Facilities Management
Once the building is handed over to the Operations team, and all Building hardware, machinery, equipment, and facilities enabled and operational, there needs to be a process to ensure that daily, weekly, monthly, annual maintenance is undertaken. Dependent on the size of the experience or attraction, duties may be undertaken by the Operations team, or a Facilities management team – dependent on how the business is structured (See People Section for a proposed organisation chart). A Planned Preventative Maintenance programme must be implemented immediately to avoid large unnecessary replacement costs of plant and equipment once the attraction is operational.
Often, small attractions will subcontract Facilities Management work, or have an in-house team, or a combination of both. Some attractions will be too small to warrant having an in-house team, however care must be taken to ensure that the Service Level Agreements of subcontractors achieves the desired cost-saving effect. When subcontracting, experience shows that having fixed standard repair costs – e.g. for changing a toilet seat – can be wise, but decisions of this kind need to be based on likely use and frequency, which from the outset, could possibly be difficult to predict. For this reason, smaller attractions are wise to begin with local in-house support on a fixed term contract, in order to ‘bed in’ processes.
All Facilities Management and Health and Safety processes should be built into a:
Standard Operating Manual
for the attraction, which will also incorporate every system and process for the entire attraction – this manual should be formulated at the beginning of the project, and built up using the Standard Operating procedures for every area of the business in preparation for employee training and to ensure Operational Excellence.