The language of
facility management.

CAFM

Computer-Aided Facility Management

CAFM stands for Computer-Aided Facility Management. It is software that gives a facilities team one system of record for its buildings — the asset register, planned and reactive maintenance, work orders, contractors, space, and compliance evidence. The point of a CAFM system is that everything about a property portfolio lives in one place instead of across spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups and a filing cabinet.

CMMS

Computerised Maintenance Management System

CMMS stands for Computerised Maintenance Management System. It is software built to manage the maintenance of physical assets: what you own, what condition it is in, what work is due, who did it, and what parts it consumed. A CMMS is maintenance-first by design — it is deliberately narrower than a CAFM or IWMS platform.

PPM

Planned Preventive Maintenance

PPM stands for Planned Preventive Maintenance. It is maintenance carried out on a schedule to keep equipment working, rather than in response to something breaking. A PPM schedule sets out what gets serviced, how often, by whom, and against which standard — and in most facility contracts it is the work the client is actually paying for.

Work Order

A work order is the instruction to carry out a specific piece of work, and the record of what happened when it was carried out. In facility management it is the basic unit of everything — the asset it relates to, who raised it, who did it, how long it took, what it cost, and whether it met the service level agreed with the client.

Hard FM & Soft FM

Hard FM covers the physical building and its engineering systems — the things that would still be there if everyone left. Soft FM covers the services delivered to the people using the building. The distinction matters because the two are contracted, priced, measured and staffed in completely different ways.

Asset Tagging

Asset tagging is the practice of attaching a unique, scannable identifier to each piece of equipment so that its history, documentation and maintenance schedule can be retrieved on the spot. It is the groundwork for every other part of a CAFM or CMMS deployment — without reliable tags, the asset register is a guess.

CAFM Full Form

Computer-Aided Facility Management

The full form of CAFM is Computer-Aided Facility Management. It refers to software that helps an organisation plan, run and record the upkeep of its buildings: the assets inside them, the maintenance carried out on them, the space they provide and the services delivered in them. You will also see it written as Computer-Aided Facilities Management; both versions mean the same thing.

CAFM Meaning

Computer-Aided Facility Management

In practice, CAFM means having one system that every request, job, inspection and asset record passes through. For a UAE property owner or FM team, the meaning is less about the software than about the change it brings: work stops living in phone calls, WhatsApp groups and spreadsheets, and every job gets a timestamp, an owner and an evidence trail that can be checked later.

CAFM System

Computer-Aided Facility Management

A CAFM system is the software platform an FM operation runs on: a set of connected modules built around a shared asset register, used by managers through a web application and by technicians on mobile. Viewed as a system, it is a database of buildings and equipment, a workflow engine that turns requests and schedules into jobs, and a reporting layer that shows whether the work met the contract.

CMMS Meaning

Computerised Maintenance Management System

The full form of CMMS is Computerised Maintenance Management System, also spelled Computerized. In practice, CMMS means running maintenance from a system rather than from memory and paper: every asset has a record, every job is logged against it, preventive work is scheduled automatically, and the maintenance team can show what was done, when and at what cost.

SLA

Service Level Agreement

An SLA (Service Level Agreement) in facility management is the part of an FM contract that defines how quickly and how well the service provider must respond to and resolve issues, usually by priority level, and what happens when it does not. It turns a general expectation such as prompt repairs into measurable targets that can be tracked job by job.

SFG20

SFG20 is the UK industry standard library of planned maintenance schedules for buildings, created in 1990 by the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA). For each asset type it sets out which maintenance tasks to carry out, how often, and with what skills, so owners and contractors can build PPM regimes from a recognised baseline instead of writing them from scratch.