Why you should benchmark the cost of your CRE service providers
If you’re like most corporate real estate (CRE) professionals, then creating clean, healthy, comfortable, and safe work environments requires help from experts outside your own organization.
You likely rely on your internal teams to manage daily work and large projects, but relationships with third parties can fill skills and workforce gaps and manage seasonal or variable tasks according to an agreed-upon schedule, so your team can focus on other priorities.
Even small organizations that manage only one facility often rely on HVAC, electrical, plumbing, pest control, parking lot maintenance, and janitorial services to keep their workplaces in excellent shape. Across a large space or entire CRE portfolio, however, the number of service providers that need to be managed can quickly become overwhelming, and their performance is difficult to track.
Understaffed facilities management and maintenance teams may rely even more heavily on external vendors and outsourced services to keep up with high employee expectations and large volumes of work orders.
No matter the size of your space(s), third-party relationships with service providers are a crucial component of real estate operations performance—whether they do janitorial, security, and grounds maintenance work or painting and window cleaning projects.
What do your service providers bring to the table?
How can you determine the true value and return on investment that these third-party relationships bring your organization? Are they worth the money you spend? Are they providing high-quality services? How do your providers compare to others? When you use multiple providers that offer the same type of service, how does their performance compare? Are certain spaces seeing unusually high volumes of issues in certain areas?
Don’t worry if you can’t easily answer those questions yet; there is a solution. Benchmarking your service provider cost data can help you collect and analyze the information you need to confidently respond when questions like these inevitably arise in the future.
With this information in your hands, you can make data-driven decisions, focus your time and resources on providers that bring the most value, and provide higher-quality workplaces that help attract and retain employees.
What benchmarking information can reveal
Tracking service provider cost metrics can help you evaluate performance and offer insight into:
- Which service providers offer the most benefit in terms of response time, quality, and cost
- Whether expected results are achieved on time and on budget
- How quickly tasks are being completed
- Which service providers cost the most each month
- Whether the services being provided are competitive and consistent with expected service levels and industry averages in each geographical area
- Whether you’re spending money on under-performing vendors when better options exist
- If poor or deteriorating service provider performance is impacting your employees
- If the performance of long-term providers is getting better—or worse
- What to expect in terms of potential costs when bringing on new service providers
- How quickly providers respond when they’re needed for emergency situations
When you can quickly identify below- and above-average providers, you’ll know which companies you want to continue partnerships with—and those that need to enhance performance in certain areas (cost, time spent on site, emergency response time, etc.) if they want to continue providing services.
Start benchmarking service provider performance now
Track and improve the performance of your third-party service providers and get the most out of those relationships by analyzing the right service provider costs and results data.
JLL Technologies can get you started with service provider cost benchmarking and provide you with tools to help you make the most of every aspect of your CRE. Ready to talk to a real estate analytics expert? Contact us.