Facilities Management Overview and Role

Facilities Management

Overview and Role in the Hospitality Industry

Facilities management has a multitude of definitions, ranging from the tactical and short-term to the strategic, with the latter having a multitude of frameworks used for organizing the many components of this strategic area. One of the best definitions defines a framework for bringing together strategic and tactical responsibilities for the optimal use of organizational resources (Parry, Collins, 1993). In hospitality industries, the optimization of resources needs to take into account customer satisfaction and the overall customer experience. Many hospitality companies have chosen the Service Quality (SERVQUAL) metric as a means to benchmark their performance against customer expectations often with successful results in revamping their operations based on insights gained (Nick, 1993). For facilities management in hospitality, the focus needs to be continually on bridging the gap between customer expectations and experiences, with the goal of exceeding the former as much as possible in every interaction with service personnel. The use of analytics, satisfaction measures including SERVQUAL and other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), including the measuring of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) have all been shown to be tied directly to how effectively facilities have been managed in the hospitality industry (Meng, 2011). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the key components of facilities management and assess its impact on customer satisfaction, lifetime customer value, showing the integral nature of this area of strategies and initiatives to the profitability of a hospitality business. Inherent in many of the facilities management frameworks is the need for training and continual development of staff, as their orientation to customers and adherence to a baseline of processes they can use to exceed customers' expectations is critical (Atkinson, Branch, LaHatte, 1987).

Analysis of Facilities Management Components and Contributions

in Hospitality Management

The structure of facilities management as a strategic platform is multifaceted and requires a systems-based approach to fully see its impact and influence across many areas of organizational performance. Facilities management is now considered a catalyst of organizational performance and growth, given the emphasis companies today have on collaboration and knowledge sharing. The role facilities management has in the development of collaborative workplaces is today being measured in performance frameworks that seeks to quantify their contribution to overall company performance (Meng, 2011). This shift to measuring the inherent value of facilities management from a systemic and integrative nature is now also showing the potential to show how quickly new product introductions are accomplished and how effectively highly collaborative strategies are executed over the long-term (Halim, Muthusamy, Chia, Lam, 2011).

The core or critical components of building operations and maintenance, real estate management and strategic plans, human and environmental factors, project management, space planning, finance, quality assessment are the most critical areas of facilities management. As companies seek to create a more collaborative work place, each of these systems are being integrated into other subsystems, departments, workflows and process areas. In the case of hospitality companies, the highly integrative nature of these subsystems are global in scope, often reaching across multiple time zones, cultures and as a result, drastically different customer expectations as to their performance (Parry, Collins, 1993). Each of these key areas of facilities management mentioned are monitored as subsystems and have analytics associated with them. Yet many hospitality companies have found that this approach to just measuring per-area performance in facilities management is not enough (Nick, 1993). Just measuring these facilities management systems is isolation is being replaced with metrics and KPIs that measure their relative contribution in a collaborative process workflows and results attained on a corporate level (Meng, 2011). In the case of hospitality services companies and providers, the measurements include customer satisfaction, SERVQUAL ratings, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).