Measure, signal, manoeuvre

Difficult, isn't it? But BSRIA's key performance indicators (kpi) for the m&e contracting industry might make competitive selection rather less of a lottery. These kpis are the product of the Construction Best Practice Program-me, for which the BSRIA is responsible for the building services element.

The m&e contracting kpis follow in the same format as the headline construction industry kpis launched in 1999. The graphs are very similar, and the criteria – cost, quality and time predictability – are largely the same (figure 1). It is the underlying data though, that make these kpis very particular to m&e contracting.

So what have we got? First there's an office wallchart showing the 10 benchmark kpis – client satisfaction with installation, design, service, and o&m manuals, defects to building services, predictability of cost and time, profitability, productivity and safety. An accompanying handbook provides the background to the benchmark data, and guidance on how to solicit client views on your performance in order to generate kpi scores.

For committed kpi addicts, there is a benchmarking software tool – Contrack. This enables individual firms to analyse their project or corporate performance against 25 'headline' kpis to produce a bewildering array of industry comparisons.

Last but not least, BSRIA is creating a kpi benchmarking club. For a princely £1400, you get the Contrack benchmarking software tool (worth £900 alone), newsletters, workshops and access to a comparative database of performance measurements to help you implement change.

Measuring performance
All the kpi graphs follow the same format: a client-solicited performance rating on the x-axis, and a cumulative industry benchmark on the y-axis.

In the example figure 1, a client has given a score of 5 for overall satisfaction for the m&e contractor's performance. Reading down to the horizontal axis reveals how the contractor performed against the industry benchmark. Here, the score reveals that 13% of m&e contractors in the benchmark dataset performed worse on client satisfaction, while 87% performed either the same or better.

Notable by their absence are kpi graphs for construction time and construction cost. This, said BSRIA's Gerry Samuelsson-Brown, was due to the lack of good price and cost indices. Instead, BSRIA has provided two other performance indicators specific to m&e contracting: client satisfaction with design, and client satisfaction with operating and maintenance manuals. (Note that these are not applicable to consultants – the Association of Consulting Engineers is producing those in collaboration with the Construction Industry Council).

Signalling excellence
The whole point of these kpis is both to find out how clients are rating your performance against industry norms, and to highlight areas for improvement. The best way of showing this is by plotting the results on a radar diagram. Scores nearest the centre show room for improvement, while high satisfaction scores are those nearest the perimeter (see left).

The kpis can be used both to track performance during a specific project, showing up areas where the m&e contractor needs to spend more attention, and also to track company performance from project to project.

This is where the Contrack software will come in handy. Contrack is a performance measurement program produced for BSRIA by Building Software. This program can hold the full array of kpi data to enable the user the graph the results in a variety of ways, from simple tables to kpi radar plots (figure 3). Contrack also contains model forms for carrying out client appraisals, supplier pre-qualification and quality audits.

Twenty five kpis are embedded in the software, including the ten written specifically for m&e contractors. The program also enables performance data to be exchanged within an industry benchmark club, specifically that being set up by BSRIA, via a club website.