Understanding Facilities Management Practices to Improve Building Performance: The opportunity and challenge of the facilities management industry over the world

Abstract

There is much evidence that green building which is initially believed to be the solution to solve the problems of climate change and energy crisis can not perform as expected. The fact that green buildings consumed more energy and emit more CO2 than expected during the actual operation is due to the problems of inefficiency in building operation and maintenance. Facilities management integrates the entire component of the built environment including people, process, place and technology to make sure that the built environment system works optimally. It offer important contributions to address the challenge of inefficiency in terms of building operation and maintenance thus make facilities management industry become one of the fastest growing industry in the world. By doing a literature review, this paper intends to understand more about the practices of facilities management in different part of the world. It is found that there is a stark contrast in the development of facilities management practices in the western countries as compared to that in the eastern countries. The industry of facilities management is relatively new and the research related to that field is still limited thus provide a huge opportunity to develop it in the future since the importance of this field is increasingly recognize.