Facilities @ Management

2.29 FM a Summary

Michaela Hellerforth

Introduction

Originally, my approach to Facility Management (FM) was purely a real estate one. While still at school, I worked for real estate companies. Studying activities in associations in the real estate sector followed, first as an assistant to the board of directors in business management issues, and later also as a member of the board of the Federal Association of Independent Housing Companies (“BFW, Bundesverband Freier Wohnungsunternehmen”).

From this perspective, I received the first request to write an article about FM just before the turn of the millennium. At that time, the term FM was not really known to many market participants and the focus of most companies was not yet on areas besides their core business.But there were already the first courses of study in facility management, often with a technical background, which, according to curricula derived from the GEFMA guideline, with the aim to introduce students to the subject and develop expertise needed by the market. There was a great demand from companies for specially trained specialists in this field. In the more than 20 years that have passed since then, the profile of the courses has become more and more specialized. Nonetheless, my real estate experience and view of FM shows me the great importance of soft skills and overarching interface thinking in order to be able to carry out FM adequately. Often, FM is still dominated and handicapped by the core business in ...