Facilities Management Editing and Proofreading Services

A contract says priority one faults are attended within two hours and rectified within eight. Both parties sign it. Eleven months later the client believes the service is failing and the provider's report shows ninety-six per cent compliance. Neither is lying. They are counting different things — when the clock starts, what counts as attendance, what counts as rectified, and which faults were priority one in the first place.

We edit what facilities management providers and clients produce — service specifications and output requirements, key performance indicator definitions and measurement rules, response and rectification time definitions, helpdesk and reporting procedures, planned maintenance regimes and statutory compliance schedules, service reports and performance dashboards, mobilisation and transition documentation, variation and additional works procedures, contract and service level documentation, and client and occupier communications about service. Our editors work on the definitions the performance report depends on.

Key performance indicator definitions are where an FM contract either measures a service or generates a monthly argument, and their failure is naming a target without defining the event. A response time is a duration between two moments, and both of them have to be defined. We work through these so the clock's start is specified precisely — when the call is logged, when the fault occurred, or when the engineer is dispatched — since these can differ by hours and each party will remember the definition that suits them; so attendance is defined as an observable event, whether arrival on site, arrival at the fault or the first diagnostic action; so rectification is distinguished from a temporary make-safe, with what each means and whether the clock stops on either, because this single distinction accounts for most compliance disputes; so priority is assigned by a rule rather than by judgement, with worked examples of faults at each level, given that a client under pressure calls everything priority one; so the exclusions from the clock are listed exhaustively — parts lead time, access refused, client-caused delay — as an open-ended exclusion makes the whole measure meaningless; so what happens when a target is missed is stated in money or in a stated remedy rather than left to reporting; and so the reporting shows the raw data and not only the percentage. Definitions written this way produce reports both parties accept.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including contracts, performance data and client information. We are editors rather than FM practitioners or contract advisers, and we offer no view on service levels, performance or entitlement. What we can do is define the events the percentage is calculated from.