QUALITY OF LIFE

The managers in the company you take care off are overwhelmed by petty tasks that are way below their expertise. You have invested in a property with the idea to let it, but you lack both the time and the ability to pay the needed attention to your tenants. The block of flats where you live has difficulties with the maintenance of the shared spaces.

These are just some of the cases when an individual or a company needs professional facility management services. This business field unites a lot and various types of services, sharing a common goal: to provide effective maintenance that guarantees the comfort and the security of the inhabitants of a building.

Facility management services are "hard" and "soft." The first group covers maintenance of spaces and infrastructure – planning, letting, maintenance, furnishing and others. The second is all about people and organisation – catering, cleaning, reception services, human resources and others.

Partnership with a good company for facility management provides the client with a number of advantages. Outsourcing this type of work to professionals allows the client companies to free time and organisational resources for their main activities. To the individual client, it provides an opportunity to use their valuable free time for more pleasant things than maintenance of shared spaces or communication with tenants. In all cases, the owners can be sure that their property is in good hands. When a single provider takes care of all the services in building maintenance, the costs are also optimised. The quality faculty management service is always individualised – it covers the particular needs of the particular client, the particular building and the people who live and work in it.

The range of services that can be delegated to a professional outsourced provider is practically unlimited. That is why in the developed world the companies for facility management have long become a fixed, important part of the business environment.

In Bulgaria the sector is still developing its potential. In the past few years facility management services experience significant growth, stimulated by factors such as the improved economic environment, the increased industrial production and the revival of the property market, including the popularity of real estate for short-term letting. The overall awareness of individuals and companies is also improving – fewer of them think that the maintenance of a building includes only cleaning and repair works.

Regardless of whether it is an industrial property, a chain of bank offices, a block of flats or an apartment for short-term letting, the choice of a facility management company should be careful and well thought over.

Before choosing a partner, it is recommendable to consider carefully what services exactly would you like to outsource to a facility management company. The proper evaluation of your needs will help you to identify more easily a suitable service provider – a company that specialises in a particular type of facility management services or one that offers integrated complex solutions. When you have a list with the potential partners, try to research them as much as possible and to find their present and former clients. Once you have chosen a partner and have trusted them, it is recommendable to evaluate their work at regular intervals, and to identify where and how improvements can be made.

Experience, reliability, desire for development and innovation are the qualities you need to look for in the FM company to which you will decide to trust. The Bulgarian Facility Management Association – BGFMA (Sofia, 36 Dragan Tsankov Blvd, Interpred WTC, floor 3, office 327, www.bgfma.bg) represents some of the leading companies in the field specialising in complete FM services – technical, infrastructural, sales. Members of the association are also companies for services for property management, cleaning, IT, maintenance and others, and also companies with large property portfolios applying facility management (banks, insurance companies, large outsourcing companies and others). The BGFMA also includes individuals like administrative directors, property and asset managers. The association is a member of EuroFM and of the International Facility Management Association, or IFMA, and has significant activity for popularisation of the profession in the public field.

The development of facility management companies in Bulgaria is also visible from the fact that some of them offer solutions based on high technologies. Thus innovation goes hand in hand with expertise and long experience. The results are high quality and reliability.

The international company OKIN Facility (Sofia, 86 Bulgaria Blvd, phone: +359 2 962 70 17, www.okinfacility.bg) arrived on the Bulgarian market 10 years ago and already established itself as a reliable partner to clients who seek intelligent solutions for their problems. The company offers technical services (technical management and buildings maintenance, urgent calls 24/7, technical supervision and equipment maintenance) and also administrative services (security, reception services, cleaning and others). The services are performed by the highly qualified staff of OKIN Facility, while quality control of the performed work is done by mobile and stationary supervisors. For bigger efficiency that saves the companies precious time and resources, OKIN Facility offers integrated facility management. In it the client company works with a single project manager who takes care of the whole range of used services, while the control and communication is realised via OKIN's own online platform and own software, Drive!. Thus the client is secure that every process of the activities is implemented in accordance with the initial plan, and has more time and resources for the most important thing: their own production process.

The company for development, sale and implementation of modern software LLV Technology (sales@llvtechnology.com, phone: +359 876 18 58 73; www.llvtechnology.com) is the author of an innovative and effective solution for property and facility management. ProPMS is a specialised software that allows individual personalisation in regard of the business and the model of the client company. It unites in a single data base all the activities of the organisation. It works with several currencies and languages, and doesn't have functional and operational limitations. As it is web based, you can use it from every corner of the planet. With ProPMS you realise financial control, manage the tasks, the orders and the processes, the rental and client relations, and issue invoices and receipts. ProPMS allows you to make analyses and references fast and effectively. All of these – and the other functionalities – make the programme an excellent solution for management of all types of properties.