Towards sustainable facilities management

Abstract

About 1 per cent of all Australian commercial building stock is new each year. This means that if new building works are relied on to provide significant change in the sustainability of the stock, then it will take many years before a significant impact is achieved. Fortunately, commercial buildings are refurbished at relatively frequent intervals, so their rate of improvement is much faster than the rate of new construction. However, there are other drivers which could lead to significant improvements in our building stock. These fall under the aegis of facilities management (FM).
In this chapter, FM is defined to cover the entire project life cycle after handover from the initial construction. This includes not only the day-today operations involved in running a facility, but also major refurbishments and upgrades.
Sustainable FM is a process that manages the efficient operation of facilities in support of service delivery, operational life cycle costs and the use of resources, and minimizes their impact on built environment.