Soft facilities management

[edit] Introduction

Facilities management is the ‘...integration of processes within an organisation to maintain and develop the agreed services which support and improve the effectiveness of its primary activities’. Ref EN15221-1: 2006 Facility Management – Part 1: Terms and definitions. It is concerned with the management of facilities at both a strategic and a day-to-day level to deliver operational objectives and to maintain a safe and efficient environment.

Facilities management is an interdisciplinary activity with a high concentration of maintenance tasks that can be broken down into two types:

• Hard facilities management (the fixed, physical fabric of the facility, which cannot be easily removed).
• Soft facilities management (the services that help the facility to function).

[edit] Soft facilities management services

Soft facilities management services typically make the workplace more comfortable, pleasant and easy to use for building occupants and users. They can also affect health and safety, security and so on.

Soft facilities management services services might include:

• Car parking.
• Catering and hospitality..
• Cleaning.
• Landscaping.
• Pest control.
• Post management.
• Security.
• Waste management.
• Window cleaning.

Soft facilities often involve some degree of human interaction from professionals who handle these tasks.

[edit] Related articles on Designing Buildings Wiki

• Business process outsourcing (BPO).
• Facilities management.
• Hard facilities management.
• Insourcing.
• Maintenance.
• Vested outsourcing.