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Facilities Maintenance Operations (FMO) provides comprehensive building and landscape maintenance services to Harvard schools and departments throughout the Cambridge, Allston, and Longwood campuses. Our services are tailored to meet the changing needs of our customers who occupy a wide variety of facility types, ranging from laboratory and teaching environments to libraries, museums and residential buildings. In total we service more than 12 million square feet of building space and over 150 acres of University-owned landscape!

Our work force is made up of approximately 450 full-time equivalent employees (FTEs) that provide nearly $40 million in services annually through our four primary business lines: building maintenance and operation, custodial services, landscape care, and solid waste/recycling. In addition, we augment our services with outside contractors for capital improvements and specialty services.

All FMO functions are provided through fees for services to University customers. We are organized through individual service units which operate as contract businesses, negotiating arrangements for services directly with customers in each school. Although the nature of each arrangement varies, the schools and departments are not required to use FMO as their service provider, requiring us to be competitive with external providers in order to remain viable. The result of this competitive environment is very tight accountability for service quality and value, with standards determined by our University customers. It also provides us with an ongoing system for assessing the unique strengths of in-house services, investing in those areas where particular value is added through responsive and cost-effective services, specialized knowledge, and loyalty to the University.

Because each of the ten schools has a different approach to the management of its physical plant, FMO customizes services to meet the specific needs and requirements of our clients. In some cases this is a full program of facilities management, while others prefer to use selected services in combination with outside contractors. Under our present unit-based approach to providing services, we are working hard to ensure full accountability for quality, cost-effectiveness, and response to customers.