About the Strategic Facility Guide

The Strategic Facility Guide was developed by RAL Location Strategies to serve the needs of small and medium organizations that did not have dedicated facilities planning expertise/resources. The Guide is based on our consulting approach and includes technical articles, resources, and tools that leanly staffed facilities departments can use to assemble and analyze data to find opportunities for improvement with minimal consulting assistance.

Our perspective of facilities is that the physical work environment should be as safe, enjoyable, environmentally sustainable, and healthy as possible for all of us. This contributes to our physical and mental well-being, which contributes to the quality of our work. Property is typically a sizable financial asset for most organizations with multi-year implications, so wise investments are needed.

Our perspective of facilities management is that it is a complex decision-making environment influenced by organizational priorities, technical facts, and expanding knowledge base. FM data and systems are necessary for effective operations, with lower cost/lower complexity systems suitable in most cases if properly configured for their intended use.

The Strategic Facility Guide is a self-guided system to help you and your team more easily manage and integrate the facility information that is often scattered across a number of text documents, spreadsheets, and paper files.  It uses a set of templates to organize and summarize this information so you can see at a glance what you already know about your facility assets and operations, along with the quality of the information.  This lets you quickly identify gaps in your knowledge so you can determine if something is significant enough to investigate further.

The Guide gives you a ready to use system to organize your key facility asset information and provides on-demand reporting about your facility portfolio.  Yes it is as simple as it sounds. But, it can still be very useful if you do not already have another system or process for organizing your information so you can respond quickly to questions, a new situation, or decide which studies are most important to undertake now (and which can wait).