Facility Management: Business Process Integration

Integration of processes and supporting IT tools is a key factor for successful Facility Management. After a review of the present situation of Facility Management the author describes an ¿integrated¿ process model for the conception, planning and construction processes of facilities, providing integration into the whole life cycle. The target costing method is presented as a means to grant proper conception, planning and construction in accordance with the needs of the investor, the user and the operator. To be able to provide figures for the target costing methodology, a concept for efficient IT process support during the utilisation phase is developed. This includes two levels: the operative level and the controlling level based on the data of the operative processes. The concept is based on standard reference models of the key FM processes of the utilisation phase and on an analysis of the existing functionality of the relevant IT tools. A concept for the integration of existing IT tools is presented, that provides the necessary interaction and data exchange to support the newly introduced parts of the workflow. Based on this integration unified objects are defined, combining the distributed information of the FM business objects. This results in a joint FM database structure. The support of the operative processes and the joint data structure enable standardised calculation of benchmarks for controlling purposes. Finally, these benchmarks are the basis for a statistical method that allows the calculation of the utilisation costs in the conception phase.