What is a Facility Management - Management System?

A Management System describes how an organisation or function carry out its activities systematically to achieve the planned results.

Applied to the practice of Facility Management, it is how FM organises its structure and processes to carry out its activities systematically to support the achievement of its set objectives and performance targets in facilitating its demand organisation's business operations success.

ISO 41001:2018 was published in 2018 to support the FM functions and organisations who are facing the increased challenges and expectations of their demand organisations and their interested parties (regardless of their industries, size, locations of their organisations).

The benefits for adopting and conforming to the ISO 41001clauses are to have in place a framework to develop, implement and maintain effective FM and a basis upon which your FM can be assessed and measured.

A well thought, developed, communicated and documented management system:

• Establishes a standard documented framework to enable consistent compliance to legal requirements and processes that support the achievement of the set objectives and policy.
• Provides clear processes to identify and prioritise risks, communicate those risks to the organisation and allocate the required resources to mitigate them.
• Enables better collaboration and communication with demand organisation and the interested parties.
• Enables tracking and reporting on performance metrics and planned actions to correct deviations from the set performance targets.
• Promotes continual improvement of service, to be better than before.
• Sets periodic meetings to review the services' performance, current practices, corrective actions, and the need to set new goals in keeping pace with the organisational change.
• Keeps track on facility staff's knowledge and skills, to ensure that they are ready to perform their roles and responsibilities well.

There are many articles and video produced on ISO 41001 and ISO Management Systems are easily available. Yet, most FM practitioners are unsure on what can be done to confidently and effectively implement a FM Management System, that is simple and one which the FM team members are willingly to actively support it.

If you have been doing your search, trying to figure out what is a FM Management System all about, then you are probably like most people at this stage - you don't know how to get started.

The are plenty resources online about what you need to implement a Management System but they could not tell you the how to develop and implement a Management System, specifically for Facility Management.

If you have been tasked to develop and implement a FM Management System (whether for certification to ISO 41001 or not) and you are having difficulty developing the FM Management System and you really need help to successfully guide you through understanding how you can implement a FM Management System then you will want to arrange with [email protected] , to schedule for a consultation.

Steven Ee I Principal Consultant I FMS Associates Asia Pte Ltd