Facility Management: Responsibilities, Delegation, Maintenance, and External Services

This article discusses facility management responsibilities, delegation, maintenance, and external services. It also covers how to avoid reactive actions and the advantages and disadvantages of getting external services. The article cites references from various authors and includes a chart that shows the different groups in a facility management team.

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FACILITY MANAGEMENT
By (Name)
Name of the Class (Course)
Professor (Tutor)
The Name of the School
The Date

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Q A)
According to Goetsch and Davis (2014), facility management is a profession/discipline
that is responsible for ensuring that everything in an organization works properly. In the case
study factory, an efficient facility management team may be as shown in the chart below.
Their responsibilities include:
Facility manager:
 Supervising, appraising and motivating facility management team.
 Overseeing the issuing of facility management contracts (Wetzel and Thabet, 2015).
 Ensuring good condition of factory’s facilities (Chotipanich and Issarasak, 2017).
Cleaning services group:
Facility
Manager
Cleaning
services
group
Electronics
repair and
maintenance
e
Catering
groupSecurity
group

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 Cleaning, stocking, and organizing designated facility areas, (Chotipanich and
Issarasak, 2017.
 Emptying waste bins, and transporting the waste material to the collection point.
Electronics repair and maintenance group:
 Conducting repair maintenance of all electronic devices including the Air Handling Unit
(AHU).
 Ensuring that all electric devices are within the safety standards, (Wetzel and Thabet,
2015).
Security group:
 Ensuring that no harmful devices which get access to the factory’s premises.
 Securing all the organization’s facilities.
Catering group:
 Cooking food, snacks, preparing beverages, and any other catering services in the
organization.
.
Q B)

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The facility manager can appoint a leader in each of the four groups that make the
facility management team, then delegate to him/her the roles of supervising the other group
members and division of labor among the group members. The appointed group leader will,
therefore, be submitting a performance report and any other group query to the facility
manager.
The pros of delegation include;
 Reducing the facility manager’s workload so that s/he can work on other more
sensitive issues, (Colombo and Scrimitore, 2018).
 It will improve the relationship between the facility manager and the various
groups.
 It will help in growing the management abilities of the appointed group leaders.
 It will facilitate quick decision making since the group leader has been given
powers to solve many of the supervisory problems at the group level.
Cons of delegation:
 Loss of control over tasks which are supposed to be under the facility manager’s direct
charge.
 It may result to poor quality work if the appointed group leader does not maintain
established work standards, (Colombo and Scrimitore, 2018).
 The appointed group leader may exercise favoritism thus demoralizing other group
members
Q C)
The maintenance program that has been allocated to the facility manager include:

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 Maintaining and repair of pneumatic controls, electric controls, and humidity controls.
 Maintaining custom air handling units, cabinet unit heaters, and exhaust fans.
 Maintaining security systems such as closed circuit televisions (CCTV) and scanning
devices.
 Maintaining water supply systems and drainage systems.
 Maintaining and repairing of production plants in order to ensure efficient and effective
production.
 Maintenance and repair of organization’s information systems.
 Maintaining hygiene within the factory in order to create a cordial working environment.
 Maintaining and repairing of the factory’s buildings to ensure that the floors are smooth
and the walls have no cracks.
Q D)
They are various external services which may be required to cater for the factory’s
facilities which include:
 Cleaning services to conduct all cleaning duties.
 HVAC (Heating, veneration, and air-conditioning) services are required to conducted
maintenance and repair of the air handling unit and all other heating devices within the
organization (Kerzner and Kerzner, 2017).
 Plant maintenance services to maintain and repair the production plant.
 Security services are required to secure the organization facilities.
 Plumbing services to maintain organization’s water supply and drainage systems.

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 IT services to maintain organizations information systems.
 Waste management services to manage the organization’s waste at the waste collection
point.
Q E)
The facility management department relates with other departments as follows:
 Procurement department to ensure that supplies needed are delivered in good time, within
budget and are of good quality.
 It relates to the human resource department to ensure that the employees hired have the
required skills.
 It relates to the accounting department to ensure timely payment of external services
providers.
 It relates with quality assurance department to ensure that the organization’s facilities
meet the desired standards.
 It relates with administration department to ensure formulation of good policies that
guide the use of organizational facilities.
 It relates to IT department to provide secure storage of data and other information
resources pertaining facilities.
Q F)
Reactive actions can be avoided by a plan which involves:

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 Weekly inspection of all electrical devices, drainage systems, water supply systems and
air conditioning units.
 Replacement of devices which are subject to wear and tire before they are worn-out.
 Adopting predictive centered maintenance, through the use of diagnostic, testing and
computer modeling to identify maintenance needs, (Wetzel and Thabet, 2015).
 Setting systems performance standards and conducting regular performance monitoring,
in order to detect any possible variance in performance.
 Developing a user’s manual that will guide effective use of facilities in order to minimize
risks of facility failures.
 Upgrading the factory’s most used devices to more durable devices.
 Conducting regular lubrication and maintain desired fluid levels in the systems, in order
to prevent breakdowns.
Q G)
Advantages of getting external services over internal services:
 Reduction in the cost of hiring and maintaining permanent employees to do the tasks.
 Enables the organization to get high-quality services from experts.
 The organization is able to concentrate its staff on more core processes thus enhancing
business efficiency, (Magelssen, Sanchez, and Damanpour, 2015).
 Saves the organization the liability exposures such as employee health and safety.
 Reduction in the cost of buying facility management tools.
Disadvantages

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 Loss of managerial control over facility management function.
 Reduces organization’s confidentiality, thus threatening security.
 Additional cost in cases where the organization requires the external service provider to
execute a task which was not within the contract, (Magelssen, Sanchez, and
Damanpour, 2015).
 It may result in legal battles when either party violates the contract.

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References
Chotipanich, S. and Issarasak, S., 2017. A study of facility management operation strategy in
shopping malls: Insights from 4 top-class shopping malls in
Bangkok. Property Management, 35(3), pp.236-253.
Colombo, S. and Scrimitore, M., 2018. Managerial delegation under capacity commitment: A
tale of two sources. Journal of Economic Behavior &
Organization, 150, pp.149-161.
Goetsch, D.L. and Davis, S.B., 2014. Quality management for organizational excellence. Upper
Saddle River, NJ: pearson.
Kerzner, H. and Kerzner, H.R., 2017. Project management: a systems approach to planning,
scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.
Magelssen, C., Sanchez, F. and Damanpour, F., 2015. Learning from outsourcing: the effects of
outsourcing strategy on organizational efficiency. In Academy of
Management Proceedings (Vol. 2015, No. 1, p. 17468). Briarcliff
Manor, NY 10510: Academy of Management.
Wetzel, E.M. and Thabet, W.Y., 2015. The use of a BIM-based framework to support safe
facility management processes. Automation in Construction, 60,
pp.12-24.

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