Facility Management Service Procurement Made Easy
Service procurement around facility management presents challenges to purchasing departments across industries. Purchasing for building-, object- or project-related requirements must efficiently handle orders with automated processes and at the same time sustainably digitize supplier relationships.
Facility management, also known as property management, refers to the administration and management of buildings and their technical systems and facilities. With a management volume of around 200 billion euros, the facility management sector in Germany accounts for more than 5% of the gross domestic product and employs over 4.5 million people.
In addition to companies whose business model is geared towards facility management, the procurement of facility management services – i.e. service purchasing – poses challenges for purchasing departments across all industries.
Facility management services include technical, infrastructural and commercial tasks such as monitoring building services, organizing and commissioning building services, preparing tender documents for conversion and maintenance projects, and procurement management for all consumer goods from energy to cleaning agents.
The Challenges of Purchasing Facility Management Services
Do your employees manage many different properties at the same time?
Dynamic catalog views ensure that only those goods and services are ordered that are intended for the relevant building, object or project. By means of predefined criteria, the most suitable supplier assortments are offered for ordering: location-, person-, project- or customer-specific.
Do even untrained employees regularly procure services?
With an automatic account assignment type search as well as simple and uncomplicated user guidance, you massively reduce error rates and rework during account assignment and your employees can quickly cover requirements.
Is your organization active at different locations?
Due to complex corporate and site structures, procurement in facility service companies often faces the challenge of integrating heterogeneous system landscapes and mapping complex organizational structures. Group structures within e-procurement solutions connect these systems to a central and transparent purchasing landscape.
Don’t procurement processes ideally have to take place everywhere?
Mobile procurement apps provide a remedy when service procurement must take place regardless of location. Trigger time-critical or time-intensive ordering processes as well as multi-step approval workflows easily on the go. Order products or services around the clock exactly where you determine the need.
Do you regularly purchase external services?
Even in facility management, the procurement of services such as cleaning, maintenance or security services often bypasses purchasing. With digital purchasing tools, you procure services just as easily as C and MRO goods through an integrated procure-to-pay process and fast, transparent service recording.
Do your requirements often occur on an ad-hoc basis?
Instant purchases (spot-buy) for ad-hoc requirements can be handled via modern supplier networks in compliance with your purchasing guidelines. By connecting Amazon Business to your e-procurement solution, for example, you have access to over 100 million items and thousands of marketplace merchants.
Onventis solutions for facility management service procurement
The Onventis Open Procurement Network offers the right e-procurement solutions for the diverse tasks involved in purchasing facility management services: In addition to the operational procurement of goods and services – both for recurring and ad hoc requirements – supplier management, contract management and the tendering and awarding of services and goods play a particularly important role in the facility management sector. Onventis customers such as Apcoa, Engie, Kötter, Spie or Techem already use the respective e-procurement solutions from the modular Onventis product portfolio for the digitalization and automation of facility management services purchasing.
