How has the discipline of facility management evolved? What is its exact definition and why is it vital to organisations? Loralyn Mears explains.
Clearly, if you’re reading this article in a facilities management trade magazine, you don’t need me to tell you what it is. You probably even have your own definition, which is likely unique as it seems to be a term that is poorly defined and subject to interpretation. But, if you’re a friend or family member of someone in the industry, you’ve probably glazed over and done a shoulder shrug whenever someone has tried to explain to you what it is that they do in facilities management. For those folks, the message is that the thing you do is taken for granted until something goes wrong, accounts for the second highest spend (after salaries) by every organisation on the planet, is essentially unknown as an industry to everyone outside of it yet is absolutely critical to the activity and well-being of every single person who works, shops, travels, commutes or lives in public spaces. In short, your work is to make buildings work.
Cheers to being part of a tiny, minority group who understands that buildings, not just people, need to be managed properly in order to get the most out of them. And that doing so is a bit of an art-meets-science niche function, which sounds a lot simpler than it actually is to execute successfully. Buildings require asset management strategies and initiatives ranging from corporate real estate (CRE) transactions – including leases, purchases and sales – to operations that rely on the coordinated delivery of services by engineering, maintenance and cleaning staff.
Facilities management (FM) is an interdisciplinary industry that coordinates the allocation of space, utilisation and efficiency of assets, execution and administration of operations and services, and the people and procedures required to provide building tenants with secure and comfortable working environments to facilitate the business needs of the occupants. Now that’s a mouthful. Let’s break it down and take a look at the evolution of FM as an industry, where it’s headed and whether or not you should outsource your FM needs.
Large organisations such as pharmaceutical, consumer goods and other types of manufacturing companies with large asset portfolios (buildings, equipment and staff), distributed across regions and around the globe, typically have a centralised group responsible for CRE/FM. For these organisations, more often than not, CRE/FM services are outsourced. Typically, the standard portfolio management strategy is to outsource CRE and FM to different providers.
That said, it will be interesting to see how the current trend of CRE providers investing and evolving into FM service providers and vice versa will impact this standard strategy. With considerable churn in the marketplace now as the major companies like JLL, CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield and others jockey for status through mergers and acquisitions, there is tremendous opportunity for the remaining 80 percent of the market’s ‘independents’ to join forces and really shake things up.
Clients today have a real need for specialised FM delivery by a vertical market. There is a gap in knowledge and service delivery support for clients that have needs unique to their market. For example, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies regarding regulatory compliance, patient care, drug manufacture and animal research have demanding needs and a different set of standards for quality regarding cleanliness versus shopping malls or other retail centres.
Many clients take the approach of separating their global operations into the three major time zones: APAC (Asia Pacific), EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and AMER (North and South/Latin America) and providing the respective leaders of each of those zones with the autonomy to choose their own CRE and FM providers. Many further divide the FM responsibility into Hard (technical, engineering, operations and maintenance etc) and Soft (cleaning, reception, mail room, food, conference room management etc) and make the strategic decision to outsource the two to different providers. Most recognise this as a solid strategy for risk mitigation; however, opinions on this approach are shifting.
The need for cost savings, streamlined operations and a standardised approach to service delivery (a single SLA, or service-level agreement, is becoming the desired end goal, but few have achieved it and some debate if it can be achieved) is having an impact on FM vendor selection. One approach is a single provider model for both CRE and FM. Although clients wax poetically about the awesome sourcing leverage this would afford, the reality is that no provider in the industry can offer a truly global solution – each has greater strengths in some geographies, some commercial models and in either Hard or Soft Services, but rarely both and certainly not in all of the above. Moreover, there is only one, large biotechnology company that has a single provider for nearly every service worldwide and they are rightly concerned about the risks of single sourcing their CRE and FM. With the current uncertainty and churn in the FM provider community, it is unclear what the right balance is between geographic strength, service strength, vertical market specialisation, cost benefit and acceptable risk is and will likely take years to become clear.
Why do so few people know about facilities management?
I honestly don’t know! What I do know is that my professional and personal networks were completely flummoxed by my entry into the field. ‘Facilities what? What is that? You’re a scientist!’ was the typical response. My former employer, Johnson Controls, not only helped establish the field of FM, but had a global brand presence, was on Forbes’ 100 List and employed nearly 200,000 people worldwide – yet most biopharma people I met had never heard of it. In fact, I often began my introduction with something along the lines of, ‘I work for one of the world’s biggest companies that you’ve never heard of doing a job in one of the least glamorous and undervalued industries that everyone takes for granted until something goes wrong.’ It’s an equally wonderful icebreaker at parties and other social functions.
Unfortunately, the awareness of FM and the value it can bring to an organisation doesn’t appear to be growing. To this end, I’ve met with multiple life science and/or biopharma media leaders and editors whose publications have never run an article on FM. They’re generally tantalised by the idea of being one of the first to do so, but they’re equally hesitant, as they’re unsure if the topic will have broad appeal to their readership.
As further evidence of this general lack of knowledge and awareness of the topic, millennials are not entering the field: few even recognise it as a potential career path. This is particularly troublesome as FM, as a whole, has one of the oldest average age work forces (49 – which is about five to six years older than the majority of other industries). The industry very much needs to be refreshed with new workers, new perspectives and new ideas to drive change in a field that is not evolving as rapidly as it should be to keep up with the dynamic pace of change in the corporate environment. Old people and old ideas are generally not regarded as an accolade that any company wants to boast about.
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This is an abridged version of a feature that appeared in the August/September issue of Facility Management.
Loralyn Mears PhD, earned her doctorate contributing to some of the early work in genetically re-engineering mosquitoes to be incapable of transmitting malaria. After her graduate research, she moved into the private sector and began her career in market development. She joined Johnson Controls in 2013 to manage new business opportunities, marketing and strategic alliances towards the overall goal of delivering customer service excellence.