Many people associate sustainability with climate change, and given the undeniable reality of climate change and its daily impact, it’s no surprise that sustainability has become a hot topic in recent years.
According to Tarun Ramrakhiani, CEO of SMS Integrated Facility Services, the concept of sustainability has a longer history than commonly thought. In fact, it dates back to October 1973, making it a topic that’s over 50 years old.
The initial Seeds Of CFP
He said, “It came to the fore in October 1973 due to the Yom Kippur war, which took place in the Middle East in 1973, when the Egyptians wanted revenge for their loss in 1967. As a consequence of the tussle between the Arabs and the Israelis at that time, the Arabs put an oil embargo and a fossil fuel embargo on the entire Western world. With that decision, within two weeks, the input cost of fossil fuels went up by four times.”
With the subsequent rise in prices of car fuel, electricity bills, etc., a lot of emphasis came upon how we do essentially resource conservation by improving the efficiency of everything that we do, whether it is the cars that we drive, the buildings that we operate, or the source of electricity that we use.
Putting all this in context, Ramrakhiani underlines that if action needs to be taken, one doesn’t need something to be invented; this work has already been done more than 50 years ago and perfected thereon since.
CFP coming Into Being
Out of the whole search to become more sustainable, building owners, occupiers, and, in turn, facility managers started to think a lot more about how they could impact customer financials and how facility management as a discipline could actually be linked to the strategic financials of a company.
He said, “Over two decades, through the 1980s and 1990s, a product evolved in the US that was later popularised in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore and focused on the CFP (customer facility planning) offering. Considering that India is already at a stage where it has to optimise everything that is already built and make sure that it is much more efficient for the things that it is building, it’s a way of thinking that we believe is incredibly right for the Indian market.”
Speaking at the BW Facility Management Conference & Excellence Awards, which took place at the Four Seasons Hotel, Mumbai, Ramrakhiani outlined the evolution of CFP, the definition of CFP, and elucidated on a real-life case study that it deployed for one of its customers in India to show how it truly works at a facility level and what the experience taught him and his company with regard to the mandatory requisites for a concept like CFP to truly work.
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