Bottom-line impact and competitive advantage: Facilities managers understand their direct financial impact to the company's bottom line and believe it's necessary to report it to management but they do not have the methodology or tools to calculate business benefits. By creating a "value orientation" of their contribution to the bottom line and measuring their business impact with an analytics approach, facilities management and other cost centers can strike a more logical balance between cost savings and business impact. Chapel Hill-based Strategic Measures, Inc. delivers an analytics-based methodology of measurement to calculate financial outcomes for facilities management functions, processes, roles, and projects. Adherence to this methodology, known as "Facilities management (FM) analytics", more effectively reports on return on investment (ROI), impact on strategic goals of the company, and optimization of resources.

FM analytics is a critical methodology for measuring business impact using the principles of "intervention groups" and "control groups" in statistical analysis to isolate the benefit from other possible inputs to the benefit, information which interviews, surveys, and line item budgets will not reveal. In contrast the cost orientation, the FM analytics approach relies on greater connectivity and communication between interacting departments-a systems view-demonstrating alignment with the strategic goals of the organization. In addition, departments may experience increased creative breakthroughs as they consider strategic outcomes and gain a better understanding of the business drivers for internal clients. Long considered too expensive, complicated, or impossible, measuring business benefit with the resulting business case is not only possible, but it is fast becoming a business imperative.

Strategic Measures is committed to supporting leaders to become better decision makers through better measurement of business outcomes through the following activities:

Training and Coaching for client companies
The initial engagement for many groups is our day-long seminar "Delivering FM Value Analytics," which develops some of the necessary attitudes, provides FM Value Analytics tools, teaches the basics of FM Value Analytics communication and language, and helps people identify next steps in their particular organization. Follow up modules and one on one or team coaching are available for the deepening all of these attitudes, skills.

Measurement Projects for client companies
We can help design interventions up front with measurement of impact as a final result, or in some cases we can help examine or assemble data that has already been collected to create Business Impact measures. Sometimes this takes strengthening relationships with other departments/stakeholders that hold the data. With techniques like meta-analysis, it may even be possible to demonstrate our partners' business impact on its client companies as a whole.

Ongoing Monitoring and Evaluation
Strategic Measures helps organizations develop a system of ongoing monitoring and evaluation to realize increasing returns and creative breakthroughs. Through a system of data collection and modeling of projects, organizations gain a better understanding of the business drivers for their department or team.