Performance And Potential - Based on a benchmarking study with nine chemical parks and chemical-related industrial parks in Germany, this first part of the two-articles-series describes key performance indicators and cost-saving potentials of building infrastructures, for fire brigades and security services. Part 2 will show the benchmark results of energy, utility and traffic infrastructures.

Performance Improvement

In Europe, the shifting of new investments to locations outside of Europe led to a dissatisfying degree of utilization of industrial sites and the emergence of industrial parks. Especially in the chemical and chemical-related industries, the last 15 years have seen an increase in industrial parks with dedicated infrastructure companies as site operators. This is one reason for the excellent competitiveness of the chemical industry in Germany. A key aspect is the cost advantage of an efficient network structure, for example, with regard to energy and utility supply.

The goal is to achieve as many scaling and networking effects on the production site as possible, in order to strengthen the whole network structure. Size is an important factor for success: The larger the industrial park, the easier it is to strengthen the network structure.
Permanent performance improvement is also important for competitiveness. It is necessary for each industrial park to understand the individual performance level and adapt best practice in all areas.

The performance level makes a clear difference between high-performance industrial sites and sites that have to be more consequent in their restructuring and cost-saving efforts. Therefore, a comprehensive benchmarking study with nine chemical parks and chemical-related industrial parks in Germany was conducted. The main focus of this study was on maintenance costs of selected infrastructures and operational costs of selected services. More than 50 key performance indicators were defined and analyzed. An important aspect was to take into account the different histories and structures of the infrastructures by using appropriate correction factors for all key performance indicators. The aim was a more standardized comparison of the different infrastructures to increase the acceptance of the results by the participants.

Building Infrastructures

An important factor was a differentiated view according to the type of building (administration buildings, industrial buildings, warehouses) and the consideration of specific aspects, like average age of the buildings or technical equipment of the buildings. The standardization of maintenance costs for buildings on the basis of normalized building costs, and not only based on replacement value, made the customer-specific allocation of maintenance costs possible. Key performance indicators for administration buildings are maintenance rates based on the gross floor area as well as in relation to the normalized building costs and the replacement value.

The maintenance rates based on the gross floor area are up to €45 per square meter, based on normalized building costs up to 4.5% and based on replacement value up to 3.7%. For industrial buildings, the gross building volume is used instead of the gross floor area. The maintenance rates based on the gross building volume are up to €2 per cubic meter, based on normalized building costs up to 1.9% and based on replacement value up to 3%. For warehouse buildings also the gross building volume is used. The maintenance rates based on the gross building volume are up to €2 per cubic meter, based on normalized building costs up to 1.7% and based on replacement value up to 1.9%.

The number of buildings was chosen as a correction factor, i.e., as a measure for the complexity of maintenance. (Fig. 1, P1 to P6 represent the different participants of the benchmarking study) shows the maintenance rates for all types of buildings based on normalized building costs with the number of buildings as a correction factor on the vertical axis. The linear regression line increases slightly with the correction factor, which is expected, as increasing maintenance rates should correlate with increasing complexity. Despite P1 and P6 having the same maintenance rate, the complexity correction shows that the values for P1 are unusually high compared with the other participants. P6, P3 and P4 represent best practice, as the data points are near the regression line. For example, the cost-saving potentials based on normalized building costs for P1 are nearly €500,000 per year. Besides maintenance, the building management costs, i.e., costs for the technical facility management, are the second-largest cost factor within the category buildings. The specific building management costs are the building management costs in correlation to the replacement value to consider the value of the buildings. For example, for P1, they are up to 0.3% and the cost-saving potential is €30,000 per year.

Fire Brigades and Security Services

Most of the activities of fire brigades are call-outs and legally necessary activities, i.e., required by law or authorities. The fact that both activities count only for 60% to 90% of the available time indicates a cost reduction potential in some chemical/industrial parks. Analysis of the key performance indicators supports this. Total costs per employee of the fire brigade and per hectare of the site area are presented in Fig. 2. The performance differences between the participants of this benchmarking study are large, ranging from €46,000 to €75,000 per employee of the fire brigade and €6,700 to €24,900 per hectare of the site area.

The key performance indicators for security services are shown in Fig. 3. The performance differences between the participants are even more significant, ranging from €7,900 to €37,500 per employee and €2,000 to €10,700 per hectare of the site. This is especially surprising, as the salary level and the activity portfolio between the chemical/industrial parks are quite similar, which was also shown by an activity analysis. The more detailed analysis and discussion of these differences gave the picture that the workload is the decisive factor for performance improvements, and cost-saving potentials can be realized by reducing idle time. This can be achieved by additional activities for the security service employees like postal and other internal logistics services.