What Facility Leaders Need to Know When Managing Assets Across Multiple Locations and Service Disciplines

As a facility management leader, working with commercial service vendors to support assets in HVAC/R, lighting, electrical, plumbing, fire-life safety, and signage is a significant part of your role. It’s also likely one of the most difficult, as you have to find them, build relationships, establish facility maintenance contracts, manage work expectations, deal with countless types of documentation, and more.

Yes, it’s an important part of the job. Whether you’re managing facility maintenance contracts for assets in-house or you’ve decided to allocate this administrative task to an aggregator, there are several essentials that you or your partner must consider. This ensures that every contract is set up so that all parties are protected, the work gets done well and on time, and financial details are accounted for. Let’s dig in.

Ensure These Factors Are Addressed in All of Your Facility Maintenance Contracts

  1. Centralization: Whether your in-house team is managing contracts or an aggregator is taking care of it for you, it’s important that all contracts are established, negotiated, and managed by a centralized team. If you’re a multi-site organization, individual locations should not be doing this on their own, or ideally whatsoever. Contracts should be overseen and managed by a corporate team, corporate leader, or a single aggregator partner.
  2. Definitions: Strong facility maintenance contracts must define the scope(s) of work needed by discipline, the expected response times, not-to-exceed (NTE) parameters, preventative maintenance schedules, any relevant compliance requirements, and service vendor performance metrics. Without the inclusion of these standards, cost control and service quality are entirely left to chance. Your team or your aggregator partner should ensure that every contract has these parameters defined.
  3. Service Level Agreements and KPIs: There are a variety of metrics that must be tracked to keep each of your locations operational and to ensure you’re getting the work that you paid for. Contracts should specify what these expectations and measurables are to ensure your business is protected and service technicians are doing what they should be doing. Communication is key here. Your team needs to be in touch with vendors and location leaders or use a single system for managing information. Working with an aggregator greatly simplifies this workstream.
  4. Coverage: Whether it’s a small subset of your locations or a larger piece of your overall portfolio, facility maintenance contracts must be clear about which locations are to be serviced. The last thing you want is for a location that is on the fringe of a commercial service vendor’s territory to suddenly be excluded or deprioritized because it was not made clear up front that the location was included. Accounting for scalability is also important, especially if your organization plans to expand in the coming months or years.
  5. Disasters / Emergencies: What happens…when the worst happens? What is the expectation from your commercial service vendors? It is important to define this in your maintenance contracts because those vendors will be critical to restoring operations. The vendors must understand what is needed and expected of them in the event you call on them in this capacity, and pricing and service standards must be clearly defined.

Is It Clear Yet? Partner with an Aggregator for Your Facility Maintenance Contracts

For facility leaders of multi-site companies, retail brands, healthcare systems, financial facilities, restaurants, industrial facilities, and more, the complexity of managing asset maintenance across dozens or hundreds of locations quickly outgrows a traditional, vendor-by-vendor approach. 

That’s because as portfolios scale, so do the risks — pricing inconsistency, uneven service quality, compliance gaps, and administrative burden. An aggregated facility asset maintenance model is best suited for organizations that need national consistency without sacrificing local responsiveness, allowing facilities leaders to standardize performance, control costs, and maintain operational continuity across every trade and every market.

At CLS Facility Services, our team delivers this model by combining centralized oversight with a proven national network of specialized commercial service providers. By serving as the single point of accountability across HVAC, lighting, plumbing, fire and life safety, and more, we simplify facilities maintenance contract management while preserving access to best-in-class expertise. 

The result is a scalable, data-driven maintenance strategy that improves financial predictability, strengthens compliance, and gives facilities teams the confidence that every asset — across every location — is protected by the right partner. Get in touch with our team today to learn how we can put the aggregation model to work for you and simplify contracts, asset management, and so much more.