Outside Building Maintenance Market Procurement Intelligence Report

The market for Construction Service Providers and its sub-segments such as Outside Building Maintenance are at an interesting intersection. Periods of macroeconomic uncertainty and increasing stringency of immigration laws are key contributors to the workforce shortage in the market. Domestic workers in developed countries often choose to pursue higher education and less cyclical employment opportunities while foreign workers return to their home countries due to tough immigration laws and economic conditions. Consequently, suppliers have had to increase labor wages to attract skilled and unskilled labor, which has increased their costs and forced them to increase their pricing.

Over the years, regional boundaries have blurred as suppliers foray into different continents, increase their capital expenditure and spend on cross-border M&A initiatives. The deployment of geographic diversification strategies through such consolidation initiatives has enabled the large suppliers to improve their performance and expand their business footprint.

Suppliers across the value chain are increasing their investments in technologies and incorporating systems integrated with IoT, AI, Big data, and data analytics to generate efficiencies and better serve the evolving demand patterns of buyers. This is expected to impact the cost structure of suppliers in the short-term but will help bring down the costs in longer run as suppliers recover the costs of current investment cycles.

Trends like these and many others discussed in this report are necessitating a relook at the way Outside Building Maintenance is procured and the procurement cost saving opportunities that exist.

Outside Building Maintenance procurement best practices are moving towards a level of sophistication which is typically seen in traditional procurement categories. Category managers now have an attractive opportunity to adapt the best practices seen within this category as well as those being leveraged in other non-related categories. This report summarizes the best practices picked from across multiple categories that could work well for category managers involved with Outside Building Maintenance procurement strategy.

For example, Establishing strategic partnerships with suppliers allow category managers to enhance management and planning vision. By adopting a strategic engagement approach, buyers can optimize their category spend by streamlining the category management process. For instance, a risk/reward-sharing approach for construction management providers helps buyers to transfer ownership of projects to service providers.

Large firms should prefer to engage in long-term contracts with a preferred set of suppliers that can provide integrated solutions for all scales of projects (small, mid-sized, or large). Partnerships with preferred service providers lead to category-level innovations and enable buyers to avail customized services.

Buyers must have a clear understanding of the sub-contracting policies of suppliers. Suppliers must be evaluated on factors such as price, quality, and regulatory compliance of their subcontractors before they are selected.

Outside Building Maintenance procurement managers also need to proactively identify and mitigate potential risks that can arise in the supply chain or contracts for Outside Building Maintenance procurement. Some examples include: