The standard
ISO 41001 and facility management
The international requirements for a facility management system. What the standard covers, how it differs from asset management, and why mature organisations run both.
What does facility management govern?
Facility management governs the services and the working environment: the building in use, the people in it, and everything that keeps both functioning. Asset management governs the value of assets across their life cycle, whether to renew, repurpose or dispose.
The two disciplines are routinely confused, and the confusion is expensive. A facility manager optimising monthly operating cost can rationally defer the renewal that asset management would have brought forward. Neither is wrong; they answer to different objectives.
What does ISO 41001 require?
Like ISO 55001, it prescribes no technique. It requires a management system: a defined scope, a policy, objectives supported by actual resources, competence, documented information, operational control, performance evaluation and improvement.
It is the certifiable text of its family, the equivalent of ISO 55001 for asset management.
What are the four principles of facility management?
Integration
Facility management is not a collection of separate contracts. It is a system whose parts affect one another.
Demand orientation
Services exist for the people and processes they serve, not for the convenience of the organisation providing them.
Performance-driven
What is not measured cannot be arbitrated. Service levels have to be defined before they can be defended.
Continual improvement
The system is expected to learn from its own failures, and to show that it has.
Where do ISO 41001 and ISO 55001 meet?
They meet in the asset management plan. A mature organisation lets facility management inform renewal decisions with what it observes daily, and lets asset management set the horizon within which facility management operates.
Cloistering them produces the familiar outcome: a building maintained impeccably right up to the point where it should have been renewed five years earlier.
Go further
Lead Implementer & Internal Auditor trainingFive days on ISO 55001:2024.
Asset management, answeredSourced answers to real questions.
Talk to MARAMMAbout facility management in your organisation.
These pages are currently published in French.
Cette page existe aussi en français : La norme ISO 41001 et le facility management.
