Facilities @ Management

1.7 The Beginning of Facility Management (FM) in GermanyFrom My Very Personal Point of View

Günter Neumann

It all began with a little red brochure by Herman Miller with the title “Do your buildings steal money from you.” PARTNER Corporate Design in Stuttgart, where I was a shareholder, was planning a cooperation with the American office furniture manufacturer. While studying their brochures, I was particularly excited by this little booklet. PARTNER developed and realized interior design concepts for companies. This also included the design of working environments. The “facility management approach” shown in the Herman Miller brochure was new to us. The fascination for this management approach quickly developed into a vision and from that a strategy on how to integrate this approach into the PARTNER portfolio. I told each of our business contacts that in the future we wanted to deal with facility management as a business aspect of our corporate design services.

One day I got a call from Dr. Josef Mack from Vienna, who almost jumped through the phone because he had finally found a person who could not only spell Facility Management correctly, but who obviously knew what the term meant.

The consequence of this telephone call was a meeting at the Würzburg freeway service station, where Dr. Josef Mack introduced Walther Moslener to me. A lively discussion followed, at the end of which a strategy paper was drawn up with the following key points:

• Establishment of a facility management ...