In the simplest of terms, facility management is the process of managing all the multiple services that enable a facility to become a profitable investment for its owners and a productive environment for its users.

Since facilities are complex physical structures that require a broad spectrum of services in order to run properly and efficiently, facility management depends upon the skill, vision and experience of its practitioners and, most recently, upon a powerful computer-aided methodology that can provide, with pinpoint accuracy, a daily picture of how all the facility-related services are functioning, where problems lie, how they are affecting costs or generating synergy, among a host of other factors.

With this detailed and reliable information on hand, the facility manager can then make all the necessary decisions concerning services, systems and suppliers, so that the facility can be run at a productive level for both owners and users.

Because of the very nature of the facility management process, the type of organization that is ideally suited to provide this service is a design and construction company such as ours.

When our firm is commissioned to design and/or construct a building, we start acquiring detailed and intimate knowledge about all aspects of the structure. This information is constantly fed into our computer systems, which then uses the database to create a comprehensive 3-dimensional model—the “Virtual Building”.

Every bit of information regarding the building’s operational systems, its service requirements and their costs are fed constantly into the database. With this rigorously up-dated information at hand, our facility managers can then make recommendations to owners about the most cost-effective resources available on the market, for the building’s multiple operational needs.

And even if our firm has not been involved with the design and construction stages of your building, we will work with your architects and engineers to build the database that helps to centralize and control the management of your facility.

Facility management is a relatively new profession, with its pioneering work having been laid out in the late 1960’s. Before that intensive period of industrial innovation, managing a property usually meant coordinating the wide spectrum of service options and systems associated with a building’s operation, electricity, water, air-conditioning, maintenance, security, furniture and equipment, and many others, without a centralized technological infrastructure.

But with the development of increasingly more powerful information technology, the control and communication aspects of the facility’s management logistics could be handled faster and more efficiently, allowing facility managers to become bigger players in the corporate profitability stage.

Today, with more sophisticated computers, more intelligent software applications and a vast array of technological innovations on the horizon, the early vision of facility management as a process capable of transforming a physical structure into a properly functioning and productive working environment is fast becoming an everyday reality.