Freely translated from an article published on IFMA Italia website.
Original content at:
All credits related to the content go to IFMA Italia.
(English Version)
This is a personal translation of the article published by the webpage of IFMA Italia
http://www.ifma.it/index.php, all credits go to the author.
The discipline of Facility Management was born in the United States at the beginning of the 1980s in a period that was not easy for the North American economy; local companies found themselves having to deal with a market that, in a short time, had radically changed its characteristics.
It was a sort of domino effect: geographical barriers, at least from the point of view of the movement of goods, became less rigid; the emergence of a more differentiated offer than in the past brought greater freedom and a wider choice; the evolution of consumer needs profoundly changed the relationship between supplier and customer.
The customer side in fact began to demand customised products and services and US companies, which had focused on economies of scale by standardising production, found themselves unable to meet this need.
Consumers were choosing more and more carefully and consciously searching for precise characteristics and no longer basing their choice on trust, focusing on the cheapest offer and not simply on the lowest price.
This phenomenon spread to all industrial sectors and the product was inexorably flanked by a service component that increasingly made the difference between one supplier and another clear.
As a direct and inevitable consequence, competitiveness increased dramatically and US companies quickly realized that without a change of course they would have no chance to withstand the impact of the Japanese ones: too much the ability of the Japanese to follow and guide the fast technological development taking place and to cope with the short life cycle of the products.
The need for a profound transformation became so clear.
It was not a question of applying corrective measures, but of rethinking the company’s organization itself to make it capable of facing the new market.
There was a need for faster decision-making, and consequently an increase in the concentration of resources on the company’s core business.
In other words, in the period of expansion after the Second World War, companies had reinvested their substantial profits by diversifying their businesses; they had grown rapidly, becoming, in some cases, giants governed by strongly hierarchical structures.
In the changed economic context, companies realised that the lower product costs were more than cancelled out by huge structural costs and that the weight of the hierarchy prevented them from responding to external stress in a timely manner.
Moreover, the policy of diversification had generated organisms incapable of control because growth had been faster than the instruments designed to manage it.
Companies therefore began to look for ways to make cost structures flexible, increase their ability to drive and control and their responsiveness in a more difficult and competitive market.
The path most followed was exactly the opposite of the one taken in previous years.
Through spin-offs (the emergence of new companies literally extrapolated from the body of large companies) and strategies called break-ups (exiting the organization from those business skills that are not distinctive and in which the company is unable to assert its competitive capabilities), the large organization transformed fixed costs into variable costs and gained flexibility.
This way of operating has therefore transferred to the market passages that previously took place within companies. It should also be emphasized the increasing recognition of distinctive skills and therefore of human resources as a fundamental component in the creation of corporate value.
Hence the need for services that support the main activity and at the same time contribute to attract and retain the best human resources.
Among the strategies implemented to overcome the crisis there is therefore the identification of the value of service activities as a basic element for the business and the consequent need to manage them.
This is what determines the birth of the discipline of Facility Management and the role of the Facility Manager.
(All credit for contents to IFMA Italia).
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