FOCUS CONTRACTS
ROUNDTABLE
understand their business.”
Q: What role can standards play in reducing risk
in the procurement of FM contracts?
In July 2018 RICS launched a professional
statement aimed at professionals who outsource
FM services, be they single sourced, bundled
or TFM/IFM services, for those who have
previously outsourced services or are engaging
in a re-procurement process. The idea behind
the statement is to help reduce risk, increase
transparency, and promote trust.
Stephen Morris gave delegates an update on the
statement, explaining that the institute will release
a code of practice for the global market within the
next few months.
He said: “Within RICS the governance of FM is
done through professional standards, and we find
that a lot of the value is coming from individual
people adopting the professional statement.
We want that to happen as widely as possible,
from the client to the service provider and not
just to RICS members. This is why we give all our
documentation away free of charge. The next one
to come out will be a code of practice on a global
scale, which is ideal for those FMs who have global
portfolios.”
Facilities managers are also implementing their
own internal standards. The organisation of one
panellist is “looking into the ability of all our
operators and going to IFMA to ask ‘what can we
learn from you and what training can we put in
place for all of our FM operators and managers, to
set a standard that we are all benchmarked against,
and that we can apply to our buildings?’”
Another FM explained they have a dedicated
26 OCTOBER 2019
team looking at insurance to ensure they are
checking and testing to implement the correct
checks and balances. It was agreed that the value in
procurement is finding the right partner and then
generating e iciencies by better management of
the estate, which is why the standards are a great
concept.
Q: The government has set out to improve the
way it buys goods and services to help more
small businesses bid for public sector contracts.
For clients, does dealing with a TFM who has
engaged a number of smaller organisations
increase the risk of something going wrong?
The panel agreed that it’s back to transparency
and understanding the consequences of the
terms agreed with the contractor. Whether the
contractor is a large global brand or not, the terms
on which they are employed will be passed down to
subcontractors or sta . It’s important to be able to
trust that the contractor has gone through the same
process with them as with you. For client-side FM
it’s important to say to suppliers ‘we are all part of
this relationship.’ It’s about getting the best out of
the supply chain and about a genuine partnership,
so it’s important to work out what could be the
barriers to that and how best to overcome them.
Andrew Lunt asked: “We’ve talked about failing
contracts, but why does that happen in the first
place? The organisations that were employed were
competent to do those jobs, so why did they fail?
It has to be something fundamental within the
pre-contract stage. Poor data, lack of due diligence
or an understanding of the risks of the contract are
probably the most significant causes.”
It was suggested that a bad business fit is o en
the culprit. For example, a public sector body
takes their first foray into the private sector, and
because they’re a big organisation they go a er a
large private sector client – but the motivations and
culture are so massively di erent they encounter
problems. Sometimes it’s better to sit down with a
supplier and admit that the di erences are so deepseated
in the business culture that they’re not ready
to deliver that contract. For the FM it’s not just a
matter of ‘we’ve signed a contract today, get on
with it’, it’s about building an ongoing relationship
which understands the everyday issues and
actually takes responsibility right the way through.
The reality is that within too many organisations
it’s not their core business at the end of the day, so
they’re not interested in FM and are not prepared
to invest in it. They rely on the FM contractor, and
if anything goes wrong (such as non-compliance)
their way out is to blame the supplier.
On a more positive note, FMs should publicise the
contracts that go well. “When you are bringing in a
new contractor you’ve got to be prepared that not
all of the changes will be immediately visible,” said
one delegate. “We brought one contractor into the
estate and they did a superb job but nobody really
saw it, because we didn’t talk about what we had
done. The problem in FM is that we o en measure
by our failures, yet with this contract we were
performing tenfold better.”
The conclusion of the panel was that the
challenge for FM is to promote the way that FM
services, however they are delivered, can create a
positive di erence within an organisation, whether
it’s helping them stay ahead of their competitors
or delivering improved performance in whatever
sector it operates.