Facility management - Definition and Overview

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

It is the role of facility management to ensure that everything is available for the other staff in an organisation to do their work. Facility management may range from the small scale (e.g. a school caretaker or janitor) to the large scale such as Johnson Controls' operation of Chrysler manufacturing. Some facility management companies (e.g. Regus) have grown to simply provide environments which other organisations may rent on demand in order to do business in a 'hotel' environment.

See also

• International Facility Management Association (http://www.ifma.org)
• British Institute of Facilities Management (http://www.bifm.org.uk)

Example Usage of management