Porterage
Internal movement of goods, furniture and materials within a facility — distinct from mailroom (items entering/leaving) and fleet/logistics (vehicle-based movement).
Porterage is the service most often absorbed silently into someone else's job description rather than resourced as its own line.
Why this service exists
Facilities generate a constant, low-visibility need to move things — furniture reconfiguration, event setup/breakdown, general internal transport — that either gets resourced explicitly or gets informally absorbed by whichever staff happen to be available, with uneven quality either way.
What the service covers
- Internal furniture and equipment movement.
- Event setup/breakdown support.
- General internal goods transport.
Assets and objects
- Internal circulation routes.
- Storage areas.
- Event/meeting spaces.
Who takes part
- Porterage staffRequired
Execute moves.
- FM soft-services managerRequired
Schedules and owns the service.
- Requesting departments/event organisersSituational
Submit requests.
What the service needs
- Move/setup requests.
- Floor plans.
- Equipment inventories.
How delivery runs
- 01Receive and schedule move/setup requests.
- 02Execute movement safely, particularly for heavy or awkward items.
- 03Confirm completion against the original request.
What is delivered
- Completed moves and setups.
From output to outcome
Moved furniture/material per request.
A facility that can be reconfigured for changing use without ad-hoc, unresourced labour.
Smaller in scope than most services on this list, but worth its own explicit line precisely because it's the one most likely to be quietly absorbed elsewhere rather than properly resourced.
Where it gets tense
- Porterage genuinely un-resourced as its own service, informally covered by reception or cleaning staff outside their actual role.
Strategic, tactical, operational
Minimal — this is a genuinely operational service.
Batching scheduled moves (e.g. ahead of a known event calendar) rather than purely reactive dispatch.
Manual-handling training and safe lifting practice for staff, a genuine occupational-health consideration often overlooked for a 'minor' service.
Performance indicators
- Request-to-completion time
Responsiveness indicator.
- Manual-handling incident rate
Safety indicator.
Risks
- Manual-handling injury risk — a real occupational health and safety consideration despite the service's low profile.
Statutory context
General, not service-specific, manual handling/occupational safety regulation applies.
Sourcing options
- Bundled
Typically bundled into wider soft-services or facilities-support contracts rather than sourced standalone.
Technology and data
- Minimal; scheduling/request-tracking software where formalised.
Competencies required
- Manual handling competency.
Common mistakes
- Leaving porterage genuinely unresourced and absorbed informally by other roles, with no manual-handling training applied to staff doing it anyway.