THE FACILITY MANAGEMENT SECTOR

The Facility Management Sector

The Facility Management Sector

Introduction

Facility management is an interdisciplinary field primarily devoted to the maintenance and care of commercial or institutional buildings, such as hotels, resorts, schools, office complexes, sports arenas or convention centers. Duties may include the care of air conditioning, electric power, plumbing and lighting systems; cleaning; decoration; groundskeeping and security. Some or all of these duties can be assisted by computer programs (Atkin 2009: 15-35). These duties can be thought of as non-core or support services, because they are not the primary business (taken in the broadest sense of the word) of the owner organization. This paper discusses the challenges of the Facility Management Sector in the UK. The paper also covers the effect of facility management on strategic and operational aspects. The paper concludes by giving the future directions for the facility management sector based on the analysis.

Methodology

The research is based on secondary data collection. The data is extracted from various journals, articles and books. Secondary research describes information gathered through literature, publications, broadcast media, and other non-human sources. This type of research does not involve human subjects.

The criteria of selection for the literature was relevance to the research topic and the year of publication. Both public and private libraries as well as online libraries were visited to access the data. Some of the online databases that were accessed are Ebsco, Questia, Emerald, Phoenix and so on.

To investigate what kind of impact and trends face today's facilities managers, Semiconductor International and the Cahners Research Group conducted a telephone survey. About 100 respondents answered questions that asked them to rank their most important facilities challenges, shed light on spending plans, and reveal their frustrations with facilities management and suppliers. Cahners Research Group also asked about plans to move to 300 mm wafer process, and what they expected the biggest challenge in that area to be. Here's what Cahners Research Group found out. (British Institute of Facilities Management 1992:20-44)

Background

In broad term, the main problem of FM adopted and implemented in UK concerns the organizational response to the needs of FM in the property industry (Wilson 2009:122-124). It should be noted that the beneficiaries of any facility provided in a property require direct response and participation of the community that the facility is provided for. Response comes in the manner where the community is allowed to have a say in the decisions concerning the facility, and where possible to take part in its development and manage it on completion. This can be achieved through community participation, which according to Cotts (1999)is defined as "an active process by which beneficiary client groups influence the direction and execution of a development project with a view to enhancing their well-being in terms of income, personal growth, self-reliance or other values they cherish" (Cotts 1999:16-20). Joint or collaborative involvement of the government appears through the imposition of guidelines and research works as well as assistance in complying to the requirements (Consulting-Specifying Engineer, 2008: ...