In business, facility management is the management of buildings and services. The services are sometimes considered to be divided into "hard services" and "soft services". Hard services include such things as ensuring that a building's air conditioning is operating efficiently, reliably, safely and legally. Soft services include such things as ensuring that the building is cleaned properly and regularly or monitoring the performance of contractors (e.g. builders, electricians).

The term "facility management" is similar to "property management" but often applied only to larger and/or commercial properties where the management and operation is more complex.

It is the role of facility management to ensure that everything is available and operating properly for building occupants to do their work. Facility management may range from the small scale (e.g. single small building custodial services) to the large scale (such as Johnson Controls' operation of Chrysler manufacturing) or even on an international scale (e.g. global service provision to a multinational corporation). Some facility management companies have grown to simply provide environments which other organizations may rent on demand in order to do business.

The definition of Facility Management provided by CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, and ratified by BSI, British Standards, is that “Facilities management is the integration of processes within an organization to maintain and develop the agreed services which support and improve the effectiveness of its primary activities”.

The British Institute of Facilities Management has formally adopted the CEN definition but also offers a slightly simpler description which is that “Facilities management is the integration of multi-disciplinary activities within the built environment and the management of their impact upon people and the workplace”.

Basically, facility management refers to the ensuring of overall status of the services and amenities being used in a business, enterprise or organization from the tiniest detail of cleaning the area to the most major details such as providing materials and machines needed by the people working in the business, enterprise or organization.

Copyright 2007 Ismael D. Tabije

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