Facility Management

Background

Facility Management focuses on making residence, work, spending time in a place, and recreation possible, easy, and attractive. In this regard, it is important to listen well to what clients or users require in terms of service, facilities, spaces, infrastructure, and atmosphere. Services or products are purchased on the basis of this. Next, the facility manager ensures that the products and services that are required and have been paid for are actually delivered. As a whole, this is called Facility Management or Facility Control. The Research Centre for Facility Management focuses on the concepts and notions of Facility Control. With the aid of Facility Control, we expect to be able to make a concrete contribution to: 

• Dealing with issues of vacant buildings and finding new uses for them; how can we deal most effectively with the regional qualitative and quantitative mismatch between available and required square metres of accommodation (i.e. residential housing, care facilities, retail facilities, and social property)? 
• Quality-of-life issues in districts and neighbourhoods; people are living longer and are continuing to live in their own homes for longer, while local facilities are disappearing under the influence of large-scale competition, and municipalities, housing corporations, care providers, volunteers, and commercial service providers are all trying to find their own roles in this story. 

Multidisciplinary

Our knowledge network comprises people who are active both within and outside Zuyd University of Applied Sciences and who have architectural, ICT, facilities, care, or managerial backgrounds. We are convinced that good results can only be achieved for these research fields by means of a multidisciplinary approach; an approach within which researchers, lecturers, students, and practitioners work together, perform research together, carry out tests together - in short, learn together. In this way, we can bring about situations in which facility support contributes to the achievement of goals, by creating, maintaining, and managing environments (including built environments) through the integration of people, processes, space, and technology. That is the aim of facility management, and that is what this research centre contributes. 

Mission 

From this perspective, the research centre sees it as its task to develop new, flexible management concepts and to investigate bottlenecks in these new and existing concepts. In this regard, the focus is primarily on management in respect of the shifts in care and in respect of increasing numbers of vacant buildings, in both the public and private sectors, and consequently the adverse effects on quality of life (cut-backs and shortcomings in economic models aimed at achieving satisfactory levels of service provision in these situations) in areas of decline.