How Can Facilities Management Add Value To Organisations As Well As To Society?

The purpose of this paper is to present lessons learnt from a 3 year collaborative research project on the added value of Facilities Management (FM) involving institutions in five European countries. The starting point was the so-called FM Value Map developed earlier by the leader of the research group. The project applied three basic theoretical perspectives: FM, Corporate Real Estate Management (CREM) and Business to Business (B2B) marketing and started with a major literature review on added value based on each of these perspectives. The collaboration included a series of workshops and preparation of research papers covering theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects. The results were published as an anthology in May 2012. The three basic perspectives of FM, CREM and B2B marketing provide both overlapping and complementary focus areas in relation to adding value. Four conceptual models are presented and compared. They include parameters and strategies for how FM can add value with many similarities and a trend towards convergence. Stakeholder relationships and relationship management are seen as crucial in adding value, which for instance is expressed in the concepts FM Value Network and Value Adding Management. Besides adding value for the core business of organisations it is becoming increasingly important for FM to add value for society, for instance in terms of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The advancement in knowledge and understanding presented in the paper offers a new state of the art, which can give inspiration and guidance for cutting edge FM organisations and professionals as well as for advanced teaching and future research