Facilities Management in Sri Lanka celebrates

Ramith Fernando

The World Facilities Management Day Falls on June 27th every year. Sri Lankan facilities management community in collaboration with the global facilities management community, celebrates The World FM Day this year in a networking event where graduate professionals will have an evening of pleasantries to accommodate a platform of knowledge sharing and relationship building.

The Sri Lankan Members of the Facilities Management will celebrate the day on June 28th at 5.00 pm, at the Fortune Boat, close to National Archives Department, at Independence Squire Those in the business world know that the relative success or a partial failure of an organization's core business relies on effective management of its facilities.

Facilities Management (FM) is the discipline which overlooks these noncore services; integrating the multi-disciplinary activities within the built environment and managing their impact upon people and the workplace.

Worldwide, for the last three decades facilities management has developed faster than almost any other professional discipline. In the local context as well facilities management is now increasingly being recognized as a solution for many building industry related issues ranging from maintainability in building designs to condominium disputes.

Signs show that facilities management is emerging with local and multi-national corporations setting shop in the local facilities management business. With this anticipated market need for qualified facilities professionals in Sri Lanka, the Department of Building Economics in University of Moratuwa commenced a new Bachelor of Science (Honours) programme in Facilities Management in 2006 under the patronage of the University Grants Commission of Sri Lanka.

This is the only higher education programme on "facilities management" recognized internationally with the accreditation by the Royal Institution Chartered Surveyors (RICS-UK), in the Asia Pacific region. This programme has already produced three batches of facilities management graduates to the industry who are serving in well established companies in Sri Lanka as well as in foreign countries.

More than thirty percent of the graduates are currently serving as facilities professionals with recognized international corporations based in UAE, Qatar and Oman.

From those graduated and remain in Sri Lanka twenty percent are employed in local and multi-national companies who are specialized in providing total facilities management services to a variety of projects ranging from private and government building facilities to infrastructure projects.

The contribution of the facilities management graduates is not limited to only total facilities management functions, but also spread their reach into domains of condominium-management, real estate management, project management and compliance, (health and safety, quality management).