Quality Management (QM) Standard Issues in FM - Based on Guidance on quality in European FM Standard

Abstract

Importance of FM has rapidly increased because of its growing business. However, due to lack of clarity and identity of FM in professional areas, standardization of FM became to be imperative in such a rapidly changing global business environment. Facility services are defined as the provision of support the primary activities of an organization, delivered by an internal or external provider. Majority of FM activities are services related to ‘space and infrastructure’ and ‘people and organization’ (CEN, 2011). The purpose of this study is to investigate definitions and characteristics of FM from both globally and domestic environment, by comparison with international or national standards, to identify quality management in FM and service characteristics of FM, to investigate the differences in service level elaboration in FM, and to suggest standard issues of quality management in FM service quality. This study examines contents of the European Standards in FM, Part 3 ‘Guidance on quality in Facility Management, especially for the process of QM standardized by CEN (2011) and explores undefined issues such as service level, measurement metrics according to service characteristics of FM. The European FM Standard guides the common process of QM in terms of requirements specification, service level elaboration, measurement metrics development although it does not specifically address various service levels, specific performance metrics and indicators.