03 · Service
Analytics, Control Metrics and Cost Optimization
The control metrics that make a facilities portfolio legible, and the dashboards that keep it that way.
For: Leaders who have data in an FM platform, a finance system and a dozen spreadsheets, and no single view they trust.
What is usually wrong
- Reporting describes the past instead of changing the next decision.
- Every site, region and vendor is measured slightly differently, so nothing aggregates.
- Savings opportunities are found by accident rather than by a pipeline.
- The metric everyone watches is the one that is easiest to pull, not the one that matters.
What I do
- Design a small set of control metrics tied to decisions someone actually makes.
- Fix the definitions first. A metric with two definitions is worse than no metric.
- Build the views in the tools you already have — Looker and Google Sheets are usually enough.
- Stand up a savings pipeline so identified opportunities have an owner, a value and a close date.
What you get
- A documented control-metric set with definitions, owners and thresholds.
- Working dashboards and recurring reporting, in your tooling.
- A benchmark baseline and a tracked savings pipeline.
Why control metrics first
Analytics work fails when it starts with the dashboard. Thirty-five years in facilities management taught me that the order is definitions, then measurement, then visualization — and that skipping the first step produces a beautiful chart nobody will stake a budget on.
At CVS Health I established the cost and performance metrics used to drive portfolio-wide efficiency across a 12,000+ property portfolio. The metrics that survived were the small number that changed a decision. The rest were noise with a chart attached.
Tools
I work in the tools you already own. In practice that is usually your FM platform’s reporting, Looker, and Google Sheets. New tooling is a decision to be made on purpose, not a side effect of an analytics project.
Have a facilities challenge like this?
Start with a 30-minute conversation, or send a message describing what you are dealing with.