Facility management. Potential and prospects for market development

Sooner or later, any company faces the need to optimize resources, reduce the operational burden and free up time for employees and managers to solve strategically important tasks. The best way to deal with these challenges is to manage Facility Management.

The word facility itself dates back to the Latin facilitas, and is translated as convenient, favorable. In modern English, there are several meanings, most often the word is used as a building, a structure, less often in the meaning of equipment, devices, convenience, opportunities. And indeed Facility management includes all these concepts.

The term of a whole complex of services for maintenance and management of the building came to us from the United States, where the formation of the profession began in the 80s of the last century. According to the latest published ISO standards, Facility Management is an organizational function that unites people, places and configures processes inside the building, with the aim of improving people’s quality of life and productivity of the core business

The most important tasks that facility management solves for an enterprise are:

• Saving money and optimizing resources and business processes while operating a building
• Providing comfortable conditions inside the building, both for employees and visitors
• Prevention of emergency and emergency situations, and if they occur minimization of damage

To date, in developed countries, no professional property management company can manage without the professional management of the building. At the same time, organizations pay more attention to outsourcing facilitation management. Its share in the overall structure is about 60% in such developed countries as Germany, Great Britain, the United States. Another feature of the development of the industry at this stage is the transition to integrated facility management, that is consolidation of all services within the real estate service in one long-term contract with a single service provider. And of course technology and technology solve everything. Internet of things, great data, robotization, automation of business processes, use of drones are the main innovations that are widely spread in the sphere of building and facilities maintenance. Each year these decisions become cheaper, and more and more companies understand the real monetary benefit from the introduction of such technologies on their sites.

Well, what about Ukraine? At the moment, Facility management is a stage of development in the domestic market. According to SHEN, only 3% of companies use outsourcing facilitation services. Many are already aware of the opportunities and real savings when using a complex of services for building services, but there are a number of factors that restrain the adoption of such a solution:

• Low competition
• Weak legislative framework
• The lack of a profession as such, there is no training of professionals based on universities
• Low level of technology use
• Distrust of outsourcing companies

There are many problems, and market players along with state institutions must work hard to make the market reach the level of developed countries. However, even now experts note an increase in the level of service quality, and with tougher competition the situation will only improve.

Also, the first steps are being taken to unite market players under the auspices of a single association and the introduction of a profession at the state level.   Market leaders such as SHEN have been successfully implementing advanced business automation technologies for integrating all processes into a single system for several years.

Being a large country with an impressive volume of the real estate market, Ukraine has a great potential for the development of the Facility management industry, which carries high standards of quality of life and work, while optimizing all available resources, which are measured not only by money, but also by time !