International. According to Alfonso Galobart, vice president of CBRE Spain, in recent years, facility management has gained more weight. This term of difficult translation refers to the management of all the services that a company needs for the operation of its facilities and its associated services. It is the area responsible for everything working as expected, a perfect host who takes care of the details so that the corporate inhabitants feel at home. According to the Spanish Association of Facility Management, this activity moves in Spain around 50,000 million euros per year and is increasing.
In the last five years, facility management has gone from managing basic and non-strategic services, such as cleaning, security or basic maintenance in offices, to much more sophisticated ones, such as cloud technology. Nowadays it can even deal with critical aspects in some businesses such as the management of data centers, laboratories or industrial and commercial facilities in general, ensuring at all times its operation, risk coverage or compliance with regulations in the most efficient and secure way. He has gone from being the housekeeper to a watchmaker who not only keeps all the mechanisms of a company or a building perfectly aligned so that everything works efficiently, but also investigates, invests and brings news to improve the day to day of all those who work in a company.
During the crisis, cost savings have been a priority for companies. In this sense, the maintenance of corporate spaces can represent 30% of a company's expenses and good management can mean a decrease of between 20% and 30%, with the consequent positive impact on the income statement. In this sense, the centralization and professionalization of the management of the multiple services associated with the facilities can mean significant savings. Also outsourcing, which above the reduction of direct costs brings a decrease in indirect costs, freeing up valuable resources time in the company to focus on business tasks.
As the crisis has dissipated and the labor market reactivates, the main concern of companies has shifted to the attraction and retention of talent, and here again facility management plays a fundamental role. Companies, increasingly, dedicate resources to increase the well-being of their employees, through services and programs dedicated to this purpose. This has caused facility managers to no longer only manage water, electricity or paper supplies, but catering, renting or employee support services that can range from physiotherapists, car cleaning or dry cleaning.
