Documents a research project which investigated the use of benchmarking in managing facilities. The research focused on a variety of sectors including health, education, hotels, defence and government enterprises. Depicts a fragmented facilities management profession that has an introspective, crude and unimaginative approach to measuring facilities performance. This arises from a poor understanding of the relationship between facilities and the core business objectives of the organisations that use them. Concludes that one of the biggest challenges for the profession is to develop a generic methodology to better understand this relationship. Without this, facilities managers will continue to perform a controlling rather managing function and to experience problems in demonstrating the commercial value of their role.

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