Facility Management vs. Asset Management - What's The Difference?

Facility management and asset management aren't mutually exclusive, but they are both vitally important. Ensuring you have clear management systems in place is important to the success of any business, and vital for keeping on top of regulation compliance, tracking expenditure, and managing asset life cycles. These are areas you can't afford to neglect, so making sure you have a clear understanding of the differences between asset and facility management is the first step. Much like the difference between test cricket and one-day internationals, they may seem like the same thing but once you learn the difference between facility management and asset management it becomes clear how important it is to make sure they don’t just get lumped together.

What is Facility Management?

Facility management refers to the systems involved in the day-to-day operations of buildings and infrastructure to have smoothly running workplaces. While a large portion of what is facility management focuses on safety and regulatory compliance, facility management also takes into account some asset management, dealing with the maintenance of infrastructure and sometimes managing aging facilities, and the challenges that can arise when dealing with these issues. Well-structured facility management processes help to keep a workplace running smoothly by taking into account space planning, upkeep of areas like lighting, plumbing, and air conditioning, and ensuring that the workplace itself is a safe environment for employees. Good facility management is a constantly flowing and changing process, not only to keep on top of changing regulations, but like all assets, aging can affect how safe or efficient a workplace operates. By keeping a close eye on your facility management plan, being proactive about maintenance, and investing in more efficient technology, you’ll ensure your workplace is as productive as possible.

Challenges in Facility Management

While there are many challenges when it comes to facility management, most of these become easily manageable when you have a solid plan in place to identify any problems and keep on top of them early. Being proactive about aging infrastructure, having a clear budget in place for maintenance, and constantly seeking updates to regulations so you remain compliant, are all ways that you can address the challenges that can arise in facility management. Like the old adage of ‘measure twice cut once’, being proactive about your facility management will avoid the major impacts that can arise if you aren’t on top of things, resulting in high performing facilities and reducing long-term expenditure.

What is Asset Management?

Unlike facility management which is more focused on the operation of asset portfolios, asset management focuses on the sustainable investment and management of the assets required to deliver organisational outcomes. There is some crossover between the two, but asset management is the practice of managing the tradeoff between the levels of service assets contribute to in an organisation and the sustainable whole of life cost consequences. This means asset management can often require a combination of management, financial, economic, engineering and other practices to produce strategic and tactical asset management plans, This is especially vital for long-term asset lifecycle planning, because if you don’t know how your assets’ performance will change over time, it will be difficult predict future expenditure for operation, maintenance, and replacement..

Challenges in Asset Management

The most common challenges you’ll see in asset management will often come down to one major issue - identifying and understanding the assets employed to deliver organisational outcomes, and tracking their performance through life. Not having accurate asset tracking means it will be more difficult to proactively manage asset life cycles and to make well informed and robust investments decisions. By developing and maintaining accurate asset lifecycle management plans, you will have the knowledge to develop long term and sustainable operating and capital budgets, and to inform decision making.  

Make your facility and asset management more streamlined, cost-effective, and efficient with our Asset Management Software.

Facility Management vs. Asset Management: Key Differences

When it comes to facility management vs asset management, the differences come down to what exactly what activities you are undertaking. Facility management ensures assets are operated and maintained properly, are compliant with any relevant regulations, and are ultimately aligned with the needs of the users. Asset management focuses on the long term alignment of assets with organisational needs and value realisation. There's a lot more that goes into these two areas, so it’s important to dig further into exactly what your business needs when it comes to managing your facilities and/or assets. 

Facility management and asset management have a lot of overlap, and can go hand in hand, but serve different purposes - in a way, they are both sides of the same coin - protecting the assets your business needs to operate. 

Let's take a closer look at how these two differ, and what you'll need to keep in mind when defining your own facility and asset management approach. 

It’s clear that both facility management and asset management are essential to organisational operations. In spite of the various challenges, both can be used to maximise the way your facilities/assets work for you.

Integrating Facility and Asset Management

The real benefit of integrating facility and asset management information systems is the improved quality of information and insights.  Using an integrated software system can streamline this process.  Asset management provides the long term strategies and budgets, defines levels of services, enables asset performance monitoring, and informs work program planning and decision making.  Harvesting data captured through facility management operations provides the feedback in terms of utilisation, condition, performance, and reliability to further refine asset management decision making and plans.

How SPM Assets supports Facility and Asset Management

SPM Asset’s, a Planon company, offers software and solutions to support your asset and facility management requirements. We offer a full property lifecycle solution. Please get in touch with our friendly team to learn more.