RIGHTsourcing

Does your Company know how effectively it is delivering Facilities Management (e.g. office moves, building fabric maintenance, cleaning) or Utilities Services (e.g. steam, compressed air, effluent, water and refrigeration) and Infrastructure Maintenance Services? If you have carried out an evaluation, how detailed was the study? Does your company know if they are optimising the opportunity that potentially exists by examining:-

• If the in-house service delivery is effective, focused and capable of delivering cutting edge solutions?
• If the multitude of subcontractors providing support services are dedicated to deliver best practice cost effective service delivery?
• If outsourcing the total service could be more beneficial?

But then again, there is outsourcing the services and effectively outsourcing the services. There are several real reasons why a company might consider outsourcing: -

• To enable investment
• To deliver improvements more quickly (e.g. culture change)
• To enable focus to improve the service
• To pass the onus of responsibility (and liability) to specialists
• To reduce headcount
• To focus key resource on the core business activities         

All of the above ultimately need to lead to reduced operating costs. Furthermore, savings should ideally be increasing during every year of the agreement period, in the same way as an internal resource would need to demonstrate year on year improvement in its cost base.

The first step is to Understand Current Performance;

Clearly before setting off on the journey you will need to understand the performance of your existing service provision! (the ’as is’) Assessing current performance against some form of benchmark is essential. More data is available for industry than people generally consider but if little of your company data exists then certain detailed benchmarks can be produced relatively easily from someone taking an outside perspective on existing performance and methods.

•          Performance (SLA’s, KPI’s and Costs)
•          Management and Processes
•          Support Systems
•          Services Provision