The term "facilities management" is very strange and misleading to someone who's not all that familiar with it. It makes no reference to what facilities are being managed, what aspect of these facilities are being managed, or why a single company would specifically dedicate itself to "facilities management". The term can, in fact, refer to a relatively wide range of possible services. The facilities being managed, in this context, are buildings, primarily buildings owned and used by other companies for their own work, and management can cover the administration and regulation of a variety of the systems within the building. If one company owns a building for use as a call centre, then a facilities management company could be hired by this company in order to manage - for instance - their air conditioning systems or the power flow to the building as a whole. The administration of any system in the building, from fire alarms to the elevators, could fall within the wide definition of facilities management.

Whilst you would generally imagine that the company owning the building would be the one to conduct the required facilities management this may be impractical, or hiring another company to do it for them may simply be preferable. The corporation that owns the facility may not have the in-house resources necessary for effective facilities management, or it could be that outsourcing facilities management to a specialized facilities management company could save them a lot of time and money.

A specialized facilities management organizers, a facilities management company can administrate a building's facilities much more efficiently than a company with no experience or specialization in this service. By being more efficient they incur much lower costs than an inexperienced and unspecialised company would, thereby saving the corporation that owns the building money.

Increased energy efficiency can also be a by-product of outsourcing facilities management to a specialized management company. Using their expertise and experience in this area, a facilities management company can correctly manage a building's power systems to avoid excess power consumption. This both reduces the cost to the company paying the electricity bill, but it also reduces the building's negative impact on the environment. In a typical country 30% to 40% of the country's total carbon emissions are the result of building's energy consumption, so reducing their rate of energy consumption can do a lot to help prevent damage to the natural environment.

The increased efficiency of facilities management when outsourced to a specialized facilities management company results in reduced costs and reduced impact on the environment. Corporations are always looking to reduce their costs, and to reduce their impact on the environment, so it is clear that outsourced facilities management has a significant role to play in the future of business.