Facilities @ Management

2.22 How I Became Aware of and Became Active in Facility Management (FM) in Brazil

Aleksander C. Gomes

Celebrating the 40 years of FM internationally (1982–2022) and looking at the future of FM, I will tell you a little about the trajectory in this industry in Brazil and the Latin America region working in a large organization with RE/FM global experience.

I learned about facilities management just when I started at IBM, 23 years ago. Because I was hired to work as a project assistant for an important project to expand the datacenter located in Hortolandia/Sao Paulo – Brazil, I worked very closely with a construction management company and facility management processes that supported these DC operations. My firsthand experience was in 2001 conducting a bid to purchase a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to standardize all asset management across Brazil locations and later, in 2012, implementing the Maximo CMMS software in Brazil and Argentina.

In 2004, I collaborated in the development of an RFP that for a first time, we went to market to find a unique solution to support maintenance and cleaning for the main Brazil locations.

And the plans to consolidate more services continued, my leadership defined next steps around FM and in 2009 we’ve reached a new level of maturity in FM optimizing the service providers and streamlining the soft services under a single supplier.

During many years, we worked optimizing the portfolio, adjusting FM services, and growing with ...