Facility Management History and Evolution

There has been a lot of debate and confusion in many of today’s literatures on Facility Management (FM) origin and discipline whereby its’ existence is still questioned today. This paper shall attempt to rationalize the existence of FM through inference of historical practices that stimulated the “need” for a more organized management practice. The paper argues the emergence of FM practice to be far earlier then the prescribe dates in today’s literature. It is to railroads in general and US railroads in particular that many authors ascribe the origin of the coordinated multi-functional but dispersed firm, which is the basic methodology of FM organization. They were later preceded by enterprises like mills and mines which tended to be owner managed whilst rail road was managed by professional managers. For a long period the management of the railroad facilities was part of the core competence of the company and as such an accepted part of line management that is much as manufacturing was to the likes of Ford 100 years later. Did the need to provide a separate name to describe the management of the facilities arise as the nature of business moved from core competence to business critical? The main aim of this paper is to provide a lucid rationalization to this question via carefully synthesizing FM history and evolution. The information gathered in this paper is based on various published research materials, journals, internet publications, author’s personal email correspondences with active researchers in this area, and authors of FM historical events, and also cross-referencing from various history and FM books. Nonetheless, some of the discussion in this paper is from author’s opinion through information gathered from past readings.