Backstage: Facility Management

"I provide needs-oriented solutions, design work environments, and maintain the infrastructure."

Johanna, Head of Facility Management | Anton Paar GmbH

The demands placed on Facility Services are high. The main responsibility lies in maintaining the already existing buildings and attached units. Our job covers the purchase, appearance, maintenance, and waste management of the premises. Compared to other companies, at Anton Paar we not only administer and organize, we also carry out many jobs ourselves: Our everyday work ranges from fixing broken lamps and giving interior walls a fresh coat of paint to readapting existing rooms for projects, products, or machines within a short time. We also construct and provide the required infrastructure when entirely new production lines are incorporated.

In our job we always abide by official regulations, directives, norms, and laws. We execute many of our tasks entirely by ourselves. However, there are many tasks which require support from external companies, either due to their nature or a lack of time. In these cases we order, coordinate, and supervise the work of external specialists. For that we have experts in the team, and by experts I mean absolute “masters of their trades” for every single branch.

I come from the construction owner representation side and during the construction of the Logistics Center in Graz I was in charge of the coordination between the client, Anton Paar GmbH, and the commissioned construction and specialist companies. The ultimate goal was to realize the project in time, in the highest quality, while staying in budget, and to take potentially necessary measures in order to achieve this objective.

I still do that today, only that now my clients are my own colleagues.

This is exactly where the daily challenge lies, because the demands to the existing building design are just as diverse as the ideas of the product areas and branches. It is not a rare occurrence to turn a fully equipped laboratory into a meeting room or a normal office into a testing room with special requirements for the gas, water, and air connections. Sometimes we only move a couple of employees, sometimes entire departments and two months later we might be doing the same all over again because Anton Paar keeps expanding.

There is room. It’s our work to maintain it and redesign it whenever this is necessary.