Furniture asset management in higher education: Learning the benefits

Last week our president and founder Mario Insenga was interviewed by University Business magazine’s Chuck Green for an upcoming piece about furniture asset management.

Of the 22,000-plus organizations we’ve worked with in hospitality, government and education, a significant percentage of them are universities and higher education organizations. We work in close proximity to these institutions to advise them and partner with them as experts in furniture asset management, so Mario was more than happy to speak to Chuck to share his insight and experience.

The conversation ranged from details of similarities and differences between public and private educational institutions, to how higher education institutions purchase assets, and the ongoing and introduction of best furniture asset management practices.  Mario offered some core advice, gained over the four decades in which we have worked in education, about how campus facilities managers can gain visibility and start a furniture asset management program. He also discussed the need for a continuous furniture asset management plan, and how to choose the right materials and processes. We’ll be sure to share the article once it’s published.

One angle discussed was the relation between budgets and attitudes to campus furniture. We blogged earlier this week about the dual-benefits of sustainability and about how protecting the planet is not mutually exclusive with protecting budgets. Everyone talks about the benefits of being sustainable but it’s not immediately linked to sensible fiscal behavior, and we think it should be.

We’ve seen these dual benefits over four decades, which includes a number of long-term relationships with our education clients, as well as with those in government and hospitality.

For example, we have been working with the team at Georgetown University for 15 years. In our most recent project with Georgetown, the project team initially reviewed estimates for new furniture that were an astonishing 187% more costly than refinishing, and the final project was completed at 55% lower than the allocated budget.

Another college customer, the University of Wisconsin-Stout, not only ran a furniture asset management project that saved a calculated 268 tons of carbon emissions but also protected its budget by 77.4% percent, by deciding not to spend almost $659,000 on new furniture. Instead, understanding the principles and benefits of furniture asset management reduced the spend to less than $150,000 – and was in line with college principles of sustainability, recycling and scalability in asset purchasing.

When it comes to facility updates and to maintaining campuses, sustainability and time to completion are major factors in higher education, but cost remains an undeniable factor. Furniture asset management checks each of these boxes.

We’ll leave the final word to Jerry Duncanson, senior facility planner at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, who said: “I would certainly recommend The Refinishing Touch to any institution embarking on a similar project to ours.”  Want to find out more?  Then contact us at [email protected].