Leading organisations expect that all business processes, including facilities management (FM), achieve world‐class standards. This paper presents the results of an international, collaborative investigation, on behalf of a UK‐based blue chip company and a member of the Facilities Management Foundation, to identify organisations that are recognised as exemplars of world‐class FM (WCFM) and to understand the processes that underpin world‐class performance. Much FM practice remains cost focused, rooted in operations and concerned primarily with maintaining the steady‐state position of an organisation. In contrast, most authors propose that facilities should be strategically planned, aligned to business needs and demonstrate contribution to achieving explicit business objectives. They argue for a common language and for conditions that ensure that facilities add value to the business. Very little is known about how these conditions are created in different organisational contexts. The paper describes a heuristic study of three cases, selected as exemplars of WCFM, focusing on the underlying processes. Project partners in Australia, Norway and the UK conducted the case studies to a common brief. The paper presents the framework that was created to enable comparison of FM processes in the case studies and a matrix of business drivers and FM outputs that was adapted for the project. The investigation identifies three FM roles ‐ as translator, processor and demonstrator. Facilities management identifies business needs and translates strategy into workplaces, owns the processes of providing those workplaces and demonstrates their impact on organisational outcomes. The paper develops a WCFM framework to provide a management tool for considering and relating FM projects at different levels in an organisation. The study highlights the importance of reframing FM projects as business projects, and concludes that participation at senior management, business unit and individual levels in the organisation is an important factor in obtaining value. The study also highlights the need for effective change management processes continually to adapt the workplace to changing business needs, and shows how FM provides value through sustaining the organisation through business cycles.

This paper reports on the results of a research conducted in 2002 on two owner-occupied purpose-built office buildings with similar concerns on how to make the buildings and facilities work for the organisation in its life cycle. The research focused on the two different approaches to demand-supply-end user chain from two companies and investigated innovative processes by which client organisations (also owners) consider robust solutions of employee performance and user manageability. Using the case study material, processes by which the owners and designers or facilities managers translate user needs into operational performance requirements were appraised. The project investigated aspects of building-in-use, with walk-through evaluation and workshops to draw out lessons and conclusions for clients, facilities managers and designers.

Life-cycle costing (LCC) plays a very important role in the cost estimation and control of a building project. Although a number of LCC software tools have been developed in various CAD systems, the LCC applications based on interoperable data models, which can enhance comprehensive use of design information and historical data generated in various CAD systems, is still rare. The development presented in this paper focuses on interoperability issues in IT-based LCC applications and on improving LCC decision-making based on cost performances of various options of constructing techniques and materials, excluding energy calculations This is a part of the pilot studies of the nD modelling project, which aims to explore a series of IT-based multidisciplinary building design and analysis applications that are associated with an integrated model through an interoperable data standard-Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). The LCC tool is fully compliant to the system architecture of the nD modelling tool, and is based on the integrated nD modelling interfaces, which are IFC compliant and integrated with an interactive virtual reality environment. The functions of the LCC tool also provide integrated costs, database management and automatic calculations of some complicated LCC algorithms. These demonstrate potential solutions to the conventional problems to the LCC-data store and retrieve and calculation. The details of this development, including the functions, interfaces and auxiliary tools supporting this development, are described throughout the paper.

Business changes challenge the predictability of the workplace formation. In the broader sense, business change affects workplaces through forming and re‐forming groups, teams and business units, so causing ‘churn’ in workplaces. The aim of this paper is to present research evidence on churn strategies and approaches extracted from the Centre for Facilities Management’s research on five financial organisations based in the City of London, one of the most volatile business environments in the world. The different approaches are analysed systematically to understand the possible impact of churn on business and how to deal with it effectively. In this paper the evidence of the link between business and workplace change is explored, and a background for consensus on churn processes is discussed. The findings and conclusions are then compared with previous studies by Bernard Williams Associates for the practical implications.