Anand Krishnan

According to Krishnan, the most important function of a facility manager is to ensure that the building being taken care of is safe, efficient and operationally effective at all times. To ensure this, the facility manager and his team need to understand and control the various parameters with respect to the building – the external layout, utilities, interiors, compliances, hygiene, to name a few. In lieu of this, TCS has groomed an in-house team under the administration department, who along with the facility vendor partners, ensure that the team follows a laid down SOP. “We have our own manual that lays down details of checklists that the FM team need to follow for each parameters, be it running of DGs, HVAC, Lighting, BMS, etc, and time schedules for each preventive/periodical maintenance,” says Krishnan.
As the head of the team, Krishnan ensures that all facilities are 100% compliant. He says, “We need to keep ourselves updated on the changing information and government notifications. Ingenuity and agility in running the facility is the call of the day.”

Krishnan adds that the facility manager must regularly interact with OEM vendors and the builder’s team, thereby keeping oneself abreast of the latest trends in building designs as well as of new innovations in core systems such as HVAC, lighting, parking and physical security. Facility managers should also have all numbers – be it rentals, CAM, electricity charges, water charges, etc – on their finger tips as they are custodians of the bottom line. It is also important for an FM to regularly interact with their peers to share and adapt best practices.