How to Choose the Right Facility Management Services Provider for Your Business
This Blog is on how you can Find the Right Facility Management Service Provider for your Business.
We live in times where knowing and implementing the importance of cleanliness and hygiene in business and living spaces is a necessity. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, it comes under a big responsibility to ensure maximum comfort and efficiency in choosing the right facility management services provider. The sphere of these services blows wide as diverse needs are established in the process.
Here are a few factors you need to remember before choosing the right facility management services provider for your business.
Customised Services - Each business has a very unique set of infrastructure that it wants to manage. Also, standards of maintenance and management are unique for each company. The last thing you want is a higher facility management agency that only does “standard” practices and processes. While best practices and industry standards are necessary starting points, if a company fails to provide customised solutions for the facility management, it will not deliver your required objectives for hiring experts. How do you spot a facility management company that is open to customisation and flexible services - ask how they see your facility management and what type of manpower they would deploy, what type of machinery and equipment they would like to have, how they can increase machinery use, ask how they would like to change current processes and reason. You may not agree with it but it will show the willingness to customise solution for you by the service provider.
Cost analysis- Cost-saving and efficiency-enhancing are the major two reasons why a business would want to outsource facility management. However, you need to make sure that the right services aren’t always the most expensive, and cheap doesn’t guarantee cost reduction at all. A perfect balance by considering the requirements of the business along with the favorable commercial outcomes can be struck to minimize the costs. You will need to write down your objectives for hiring a professional facility management company and the risk that you want to address. When you receive a quote make sure objectives and risk are addressed otherwise you will get a lower cost but your objectives may not be met or risk may not be addressed.
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) - You need to make sure the cost is “Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)” for the services and not like an iceberg cost whereby many costs that you incur are not accounted for by the vendor in the cost sheet. Many times companies miss out on putting a dollar cost for resources and hours spent by themselves on handling daily administrative work, running payroll, checking multiple bills, getting involved with vendor staff, etc. These are hidden costs that you as an organisation incur but the cheapest vendor is getting the benefit of taking these reverse services from you at zero cost for them. Include the cost of running payroll, making compliance payment & fillings, managing uniforms, training programs, induction of new employees, on-site training, etc.
Service expertise- It is crucial to choose facility management service providers that are experts in their line of business. Their expertise could come hand in hand with your efficiency as well. if they know what they are doing and if the implementation is right, the core business managers can focus on their job. Their better and more affluent perspective in managing the tasks can improve the work culture at your business which boosts employee satisfaction as well.
Resources & Commitment- Selecting the biggest and largest company is not the only answer for selecting the right vendor for facility management. On paper they may have more geography to cover, and more cities operated but in reality are they ready to commit time and resources to your business? How long they will do transition management, who will lead the transition, and who is coming consistently to have your business - is that junior sales representative or senior operations manager, or management itself? Checking on these will help you understand what type of resources the facility management company is ready to allocate for you. Finally, you want a successful transition of the facility management to the new company and to meet your objectives for outsourcing. These are important indicators to understand in crisis how the company will allocate resources for you.
Use of Technology- Today many facility management companies talk about the use of technology platforms and applications. While it is one thing to show demo products and another to actually implement and use them. The right question to ask is how many years you have been using technology for facility management, which users are on board the platform, and can you share actual reports as samples for us to see the output and data that is being utilised.
Reputation- Word of mouth goes hand in hand with the quality of work that the service providers achieve in their business. Goodwill in this industry is very difficult to maintain and hence acts as a prime factor to help you choose the one you want. Right from being able to get the reviews of the service providers’ performance from the customers, it becomes easier to choose the right people to get the job done. One simple way to check the reputation is to ask the company to provide references and reach out to them for feedback.
The market of choosing the right facility management provider for your business comes with a swarm of options. However, it will be very simple to prepare an evaluation sheet based on the above 7 key criteria and evaluate which agency is best to manage your facilities.
At Crest, we conceptualize and enhance our service according to the needs of our customers to give them the best experience as per their business objectives. Making your life simple is our motive and we look forward to adding value to it with our undeterred expertise.
At Crest, our facility management experts with decades of expertise and data gathered from thousands of properties are curating simple steps series. Our expert advice will help improve the lives of our customers and add value.
Siddharth Bhat. The author is CEO at Crest Property Solutions. One of the leading facility management company that managed large and high-end properties across multiple locations.