How Many Vendors Do You Oversee in Your Facility Management Department?

If you’re like other facility leaders, your roster of commercial service vendors likely ranges from several to more than a dozen (or maybe even more). Some of these vendors might provide support for multiple disciplines, such as HVAC, electric, and plumbing. While that’s certainly advantageous, it’s likely a benefit only for one or perhaps a few locations. What about the rest? If you have a few dozen locations, the number of vendors you work with is likely extensive. If you have hundreds of locations, the number is undoubtedly staggering.

Now consider all of the various tasks and responsibilities that you and your team carry in dealing with all of these different commercial service vendors:

  • Building meaningful long-term relationships
  • Setting vendors up and onboarding them
  • Managing communications for every service job
  • Handling paperwork and financial transactions
  • Dealing with service issues and ensuring resolution
  • Conducting reviews to ensure reliable performance

And that’s just a sampling of the workload involved with managing commercial service vendors. What facility teams today need more than ever is a solution for vendor consolidation. But how can that be achieved when you have a large number of locations serviced by different vendors?

The solution is a facility management aggregator. Rather than working with dozens or hundreds of self-performers for every location in your footprint, partnering with an aggregator transfers this responsibility to a specialized company that handles all vendor relationships, service call coordination, and asset maintenance planning on your behalf. In doing so, your team can focus on higher priority needs and pursue FM goals — and spend less time dealing with countless vendors for every location. Let’s dive into some of the benefits of vendor consolidation via facility management aggregators.

How Vendor Consolidation with an Aggregator Benefits Your Organization

  • Dramatically reduced administrative workload — We’ve already touched on this a bit, but one of the most immediate benefits of venture consolidation with an aggregator is that many of the administrative tasks that you and your team have to handle will be transferred to a different team. Consider what you and your team could accomplish if all of the tasks outlined above were being handled strategically on a daily basis.
  • A unified work order management system (WOMS) — Tired of dealing with tech fatigue? You might have your own WOMS, but it’s likely your vendors also have systems that your team has had to learn. Clearly, learning a variety of different WOMS is a painstaking process and is fraught with risk and annoyance. Working with an aggregator for vendor consolidation means that the aggregator team takes on not only the process of dealing with work orders in different systems, but also has experience with most common systems in use today.
  • A single point of contact (for emergencies, too) — If you’ve ever had an emergency at one of your locations, this one will most likely resonate deeply with you. The last thing you need to be dealing with when a situation arises is figuring out which company to call and deal with people you don’t know. With the right aggregator, the person you call for an emergency is the same person that manages your account every day. And for non-emergencies, that same contact will be the person you hear from for any other facility asset maintenance needs.
  • Clear estimates and invoices — At some point in your career, you’ve likely been caught off guard by an estimate for a repair or new project or even an invoice received after a new installation or maintenance call was completed. When you work with an aggregator for vendor consolidation, all vendors in that aggregator’s roster have been fully vetted and are reliable. Terms, conditions, and expectations are set with the vendor so that all pricing is known upfront as much as possible. Any deviances or changes are communicated with you early on so that you know what to expect.
  • Centralized program documentation — There are a variety of documents and resources that come with a facility asset maintenance program. If you’ve had to deal with different vendors for each location in your footprint, managing all of that information and even simply keeping it in one place is most likely bordering on impossible. With an aggregator that uses familiar systems and processes, all that documentation can be easily centralized and made accessible to you and your team 24/7/365.
  • Reduced vendor issues and call-backs — Here’s another one that has likely been a thorn in the side for you and your team. Vendor callbacks are a pain, especially when it’s for a location that you rarely hear from and for which you have no idea who the most regularly used service vendors are. It creates complexity and frustration. With an aggregator, the vendors that they work with have proven themselves by meeting key performance indicators over time. You and your team no longer have to deal with these frustrating calls, and best of all, it’s likely that they won’t be happening in the first place.

Achieve Your Vendor Consolidation Goals with CLS Facility Services

partnered with organizations across multiple industries to help them not only realize the benefits of vendor consolidation but also make their facility asset maintenance strategy more proactive and effective. With a full suite of capabilities spanning numerous asset types as well as a proven national network of commercial service vendors, we’re the aggregator partner you need to make your facility management program work better for you.

Connect with us today to learn more about us and how we can help you make the most out of your facility management program.