Outsourcing certain key functions of your business can deliver significant benefits. Focus on what matters most and do what you do best. If your business isn’t an expert in certain areas, the best thing you can do is outsource it to someone who is, while your employees focus on what’s core to running your business.
When it comes to facilities management, you’ll find an excellent candidate for outsourcing. With the right facilities management company as your partner, it’s a win-win for all parties.
What is Facilities Management?
Facilities management is the broad term for the business function that ensures your physical locations are running properly. This means, you are fulfilling your brand promise to your customers and employees by delivering comfort, safety, and efficiency at your physical locations. It includes making sure the facility’s structure, the systems that support it (like HVAC systems and doors), and the business-critical equipment is kept in working order.
Because it’s such a far-reaching discipline, it requires someone to have expertise in everything – from construction knowledge to specialized equipment to the technology that drives them. This is often too big of an ask of any one person. To simplify facilities management, especially when the enterprise has numerous physical locations, many organizations turn to a facilities management vendor partner.
What are the Key Benefits of Facilities Management Outsourcing?
There are many advantages to outsourcing facilities management services, from the basic reduction of costs to optimizing your facility management program to get things done quicker and more efficiently. If you’re attempting to make a case for outsourcing, focus on these benefits:
- Reduce operational burdens:
How much time and effort do employees spend on facilities management? Is it impacting productivity in other areas because staff members feel overburdened? Does each location have different processes? You can alleviate these burdens by outsourcing to a facility management vendor partner to provide the expertise and structure to simplify facility management operations. - Access expert and vetted service technicians: When you outsource facilities management, you’ll have on-demand access to service technicians that have extensive experience. You won’t need to place the task on your in-house team, which may not have the expertise – nor will you have to waste time looking for a provider in your area.
- Control costs: You can immediately decrease the costs of facility management by outsourcing. The fees you pay to a facilities management company will typically be much less than you are incurring today, especially when you go beyond direct costs (staffing), to indirect costs (infrastructure equipment), soft costs (such as lost productivity), and other hidden costs. Plus, you’ll save on expenses for emergency technicians. A facility management vendor partner with a national footprint will be able to aid you in work order auditing and preventative maintenance that avoids costly fixes and replacements, and they have negotiated rates in line with industry standards, eliminating the need to micro-manage invoices from individual service providers.
- Gain efficiencies: A facilities management company is versatile and can scale much faster than you can internally. Because of these abilities, you can gain efficiencies in operations as your business grows and changes over time. For example, new locations, equipment upgrade initiatives, and projects can be brought online quickly. Your facility management vendor partner can also help you standardize your processes for how repair orders are placed, how issues are prioritized, and how invoices are managed.
- Leverage data for better decision-making: A facilities management company collects, monitors, and tracks its activities regarding your facility and its equipment. This practice generates tons of standardized data, which you can then use to forecast for the future, greatly improving decision-making when it comes to capital planning and major repair vs replace commitments.
In reviewing these benefits, you can also remove any misconceptions about outsourcing facilities management. The reality is that outsourcing to a facilities management company could be one of the best decisions you make.
Is Facilities Management Outsourcing Right for You?
In weighing the benefits of outsourcing, you’ll want to consider these things:
- Cost: Is it less expensive to outsource than to keep in-house (keep in mind direct, indirect, soft, and hidden costs in calculating this)?
- Need: Does the task represent a recurring need?
- Efficiency: Are outsourced providers able to do the job better and more effectively?
- Advantage: Is there any true and measurable strategic competitive advantage in keeping it in-house?
Based on the answers to these questions, you’ll be able to make the right choice for facilities management.
Explore Outsourced Facilities Management with Vixxo
The bottom line for deciding to outsource facilities management is asking one simple question – “Are you spending your time and money wisely?” If you have partnered with a company like Vixxo, the answer can be yes. Explore our facilities management capabilities today.