Background

The Total Facilities Management Company (TFMC) is an award-winning, world-class organisation and the largest facilities management company in Africa. It is a major operating division of the Mvelapanda group of companies, one of South Africa’s leading black-empowered organisations that employs in excess of 30,000 people in its support service divisions, and is an investment holding company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) in the Industrial Services sector.

TFMC was established in July 2000 to provide comprehensive property and facilities management services to Telkom, South Africa’s primary fixed-line operator, through a ten-year contract. Valued at R10.5 billion, the contract covers all of Telkom’s sites that comprise 6500 properties, 22,900 buildings, 14,500 masts and all ancillary telecommunication infrastructure, totaling in excess of 2.6-million square meters of floor space, throughout South Africa.

The implementation of a Quality System (ISO9001) was stated as a prerequisite in the Facilities Management Services (FMS) agreement between TFMC and Telkom, and the TFMC Compliance Department was therefore tasked with achieving ISO9001:2000 certification. TFMC (Telkom Contract) received its ISO9001:2000 certification in 2005, and successfully passed a re-certification audit in November 2008. In addition, in order for TFMC to comply with its Corporate Responsibilities regarding the Telkom contract, TFMC instructed the Compliance Department to prepare the company for ISO14001 and OSHAS18001 certification, the latter to ensure compliance with the Occupational Health and Safety Act of 1997. These two certifications were achieved in October 2007.

The Compliance Department realized early on that the maintenance of three Management Systems would be a daunting task, especially in the light of continuing budget pressure from Telkom. It therefore had to find ways of leveraging economies of scale, and the most obvious route was to look at the possibility of implementing an Integrated Management System (IMS). The Department made a proposal to TFMC management in this regard and in 2008 were given the green light.

Setting the goal

The primary goal of the implementation of an IMS was to ease the workload on the business by optimizing as many aspects of the IMS as were practicably possible. However, as soon as work on the IMS started, certain logical constraints were encountered:

• No external auditors accredited to audit an IMS were available in South Africa. Although such auditors could be sourced from overseas, the Compliance Department was concerned that such auditors would tend to lean towards their own areas of expertise, and so neglect other systems.

• In addition, TFMC’s objectives with the implementation and maintenance of ISO14001 and OSHAS1800 had always been to ensure compliance with the National Environmental Management Act (NEMA) and the Occupational Health and Safety Act, respectively. It therefore made sense to keep certain aspects of the three systems separate.

This meant that the Department had to attempt to establish a single perspective for the TFMC employee whilst maintaining three different systems from a statutory and external audit viewpoint (depicted below) .

The Five Pillars of the TFMC IMS

Admittedly, some of the five pillars indicated below already existed when the Department began to think seriously about the TFMC IMS – it could be argued that the fact that it had to implement and maintain three separate systems evolved into a need for standardization and optimization, if only to lighten its workload.

Preventative and Corrective Action Management

A primary example of this was the RIMS system. The RIMS system was an adaptation of the SAP Quality Notification module, and was initially developed to manage risk within TFMC. However, it became clear reasonably quickly that the system could also be utilized as an Activity or Task Management System. The Compliance Department started using the system to capture and allocate corrective actions emanating from the many internal audits, and this practice was soon adopted and accepted by the TFMC Executives. Almost without noticing, RIMS had developed into a fully integrated Preventative and Corrective Action System, which seamlessly combined preventive and corrective actions from ISO9001, ISO14001 and OSHAS18001 into one tool.

Systems Application at Business Process level

Another pillar that initially developed independently of the establishment of the IMS was the incorporation of system requirements into TFMC’s business processes. The Compliance Department, who had been primarily responsible for business process development, experimented with methods for optimizing processes, and quickly settled on a methodology that combined aspects of Activity-based Costing (ABC) and Value-Add Analysis. The Department developed Microsoft Visio templates that allowed it to capture metadata against each activity, which was then analyzed by an in-house developed tool to yield process costs, etc. From this point on it was a natural progression to add additional fields to the metadata for each activity in a process that depicted risks and / or controls in terms of each of the three systems. This allowed the Department to ensure that relevant system controls were built into each active business process in the business.

Once the Compliance Department came to grips with its new creation, it realized that it was possible to integrate the requirements of the three systems into TFMC’s business processes to such an extent that the process operator (i.e. the person executing the process) would not even notice that he/she was satisfying a requirement from one system here, one system there in the next activity, and so on: from the process operator’s viewpoint, he/she would simply be following a business process.

Simultaneous External Audits

The first external audits of all three systems were conducted in 2007, and the Compliance Department swiftly recognized that expecting the business to set two weeks or more aside each year so that external audits could be conducted, was too much to ask. In addition, all three external audits were conducted on a national basis, which resulted in exorbitant S&T costs. The Department therefore settled on simultaneous audits which reduced the duration of the three audits to only a week. This resulted in a heavy workload on the Compliance Department, with its members having to split up in order to accompany each external auditor, but proper planning and scheduling, as well as obvious savings in terms of S&T and business involvement, ensured that this became the norm.

Governance Documentation Integration

At this point, initial serious thinking about an IMS began, and the most logical starting point was TFMC’s governance documentation. It is a known fact that there are many elements common to all three management systems, and the Compliance Department set about integrating these from a documentation viewpoint. It was realized early on that, despite combining three documents into one, it had to be ensured that the requirements of all three systems were met, and to be remembered that the single document still had to be slotted into three separate management systems.

This reminded those members of the Department with some IT background of Object Orientation, where an object (in this case a document) with metadata would be re-used in different locations, and once a change was made to the object (i.e. the document was updated), the change would be instantly reflected in all its locations.

A natural progression from this was that a fourth management system (the IMS) which contained all of the combined documents, could be created. In fact, the structure of this IMS could be determined by working backwards from the varied subjects of the combined documents. The initial idea was that, from a documentation structure viewpoint, the result would create a situation where most of the documents would reside in the IMS structure, and the structures of the other three systems would simply refer to the relevant documents in the IMS. However, once the Department developed and populated this structure, it came to an interesting realization – the structure closely resembled the ISO9001 documentation structure – and not the 2000 version, but the 2008 version!

Integrated Internal Audits and Management Reviews

When the Compliant Department began to look at integrating its internal audit checklists, the work on integrating the governance documentation provided useful guidelines. Since many of the governance documents had been combined, the internal auditor would simply have to audit the business in terms of compliance with the document – this compliance would automatically infer compliance with all three the systems.

The same applied to business process audits – a process audit would at the same time be a verification of compliance with all three systems, since controls ensuring adherence had been built in to the processes already. This meant that it became possible to develop checklists for the internal auditors that included verification of compliance with all three systems (and drastically impacted on the way that TFMC managed its client’s facilities).

Since the results of internal audits represented one of the inputs to any management review, it followed logically that the management reviews themselves could also be combined. This ensured that on a quarterly basis, all three systems were reviewed - which provided better management of outstanding gaps. In addition, the actual durations of TFMC’s Corporate Management Review meetings became considerably shorter because the Department were able to summarize regional inputs and therefore focus only on the significant aspects highlighted by the relevant forums.

A logical evolution

The objectives were achieved: the load of maintaining TFMC’s management systems on the rest of the business was lessened significantly by developing an Integrated Management System that works for TFMC. One of the critical success factors was that the Compliance Department refused to be influenced by the hype around the words ‘ integration’ – instead, it prodded this unwieldy mass that was TFMC’s management systems here and there, and watched it evolve into something that made logical sense. Another success factor was the facility to articulate the objectives clearly and sell it to the business early on – the Compliance Department executed their daily operations with the IMS objectives always in the back of their minds.