Facility management for
commercial properties.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.