According to the definitions of the European standard EN15221 Facility Management, Facility Management is a very broad discipline that includes ICT. Not everyone in those facility disciplines will experience it that way, but the definition of facility management actually includes all support services. The European standard EN15221 is managed by CEN – European Committee for Standardization.
From 2017, the first parts of the global standard ISO41001 Facility Managementhave been published. However, this standard is (unfortunately) limited to the built environment and is therefore incomplete.
In the Netherlands, a classification of facility management according to SCOPAFIJTH is common, but EN15221 defines Facility Management as the sum of the following disciplines:
People & Organization:
- Business Support (management support) – secretarial services, purchasing, marketing & communication, legal affairs, human resources, financial affairs
- Health, Safety, Security Environment – workplace safety, safety of people, environmental factors
- Hospitality – reception, contact center, catering & vending machines, meeting rooms & meetings, work clothes, laundry
- ICT – service desk, IT-services, netwerken & telecommunicatie, training
- Logistics – office facilities, document management, removals, travel, fleet, transport
- Organization specific functions – business applications, sector-specific facilities
Space & Infrastructure:
- Space (accommodation) – buildings, equipment, maintenance, energy, water, waste
- Outdoors – land management, parking facilities
- Cleaning – all cleaning activities
- Workplace – spaces, furniture, plants, art
- Primary activities specific – external workplaces
Central (horizontal) functions:
- Sustainability
- Quality
- Risk
- Identity
Regardless of whether the reader experiences this classification in the same way, EN15221 provides a classification of supporting service domains that all have the same purpose: supporting the "primary" activities of an organization. With the USM process model, all of these service domains can find their universal process model for setting up their services - regardless of the organizational structure, regardless of the clustering of tasks therein, and regardless of the supporting tools they use.
Moreover, with such a uniform process model, it quickly becomes clear that large profits can be achieved by using one supporting tool for coordinating all activities. Various service management tools do their best to support that pluralism, but often they lose themselves in a modular approach that does not support the desired integration across those task areas.
Anyone who is subsequently able to organize his support organization across multiple task domains in one interdisciplinary shared service center (iSSC)can achieve the maximum efficiency for his user organization.
The SURVUZ Foundation provides support for the required insight into this matter, with issues related to the design of such iSSCs, the preparation of strategic improvement plans, the selection and organization of tools, and the training of employees.
