'Nigeria Needs Regulation and Legislation to Grow FM Industry'

An insight into Facilities Management (FM)

From a layman’s understanding, facilities management has to do with people, process and environment. It integrates all these to make a built environment enjoy the benefits of longevity. It goes beyond just cleaning a place into the objective of a business and a building. Any building is designed and built for a particular purpose. This determines the kind of maintenance that such a building enjoys. If we take a hotel, for instance, you know that people come in there to stay or to perform one function or another. It must therefore, have comfort so that anyone who comes there enjoys the facilities and the comfort of the place. What this means is that efforts must be made towards ensuring that everything that will make the customers enjoy their stay in the hotel is in place. You can’t afford to say that there is no light, the AC is not working, the toilets have no water or that the environment is untidy.

FM as a relatively new industry in Nigeria

Facilities management is still evolving even in advanced societies like UK , US and other parts of the world. Even in those places, the landscape is changing almost on daily basis. Every day you find new things being established. On a general note, you can say that this industry is still evolving but to be more specific or definitive, you can say that there is still room for growth and improvement in the areas that we already know about.

Achieving Real Value Through Partnership

In the world of facilities management, building a really good relationship between the FM provider and client is indeed the most critical aspect of the business. There is no perfect client as there is no perfect service provider, and whether clients are difficult or not is dependent on their marketplace, their own end users and their relationship with service providers.

The ambition of FM service providers is to build a long-term relationship that is mutual and beneficial to both parties. So, partnership is meaningful because solutions are shared. To the FM provider, this means working together with client as a team no matter how difficult the client or contract framework may be to satisfy, and to the client, it means an assurance of business continuity.

Working as a team demands that each party respects and trusts one another. If this does not happen, then the team will fail to perform. In support services, the team ethics goes beyond just the immediate employees of the service provider; it includes the client and its people as well. If true partnership is missing, the real value from excellent facilities management support will be hard to deliver and the expectations of the end users will not be fulfilled – the collective efforts of both parties would have failed.