Cost vs. Performance: Finding the Happy Medium

by Sid Shetty, President, inGEAR – a division of ServiceChannel

Facilities teams have a key role to play in ensuring their stores get the best service possible at a price that fits their organization’s R&M budget. To do this, they need to be given the right tools to view, spend, and perform.

ServiceChannel’s InSite reports feature a powerful tool called “Spend Map,” which is a snapshot of your spend across the entire United States. It shows you the average spend and total spend by category and trade. Spend Map allows you to create a “30,000 foot view” of your spend for the entire country. By adjusting the slider on the report, you can focus on problem states by overall or average spend. This will give you direction on what to focus on. Drill down further to discover if a particular trade, service provider, or location is an issue that’s causing your overall spend to be higher than expected.

In addition to these high-level reports that cater towards your spend, you need to factor in overall performance by your vendors. This is why we launched Vendor Performance Scorecards.

Vendor Performance Scorecards

This report shows you your overall compliance schedule, work order distribution, and SLA analysis, by vendor and trade.

At the end of the day, it’s all about the partnership. We want to give clients the overview of that partnership. We want you to be able to go into Proview, in ServiceClick, and pull out Vendor Scorecards to give you visibility on overall trade, or participating vendors within a trade. You can see how they stand with all the other vendors that provide service for you.

One of the things that can make a difference is holding your vendors to certain standards, i.e., benchmarking against others: How do they compare to other vendors in that trade? Are they updating your stores with the schedule changes and expected ETAs? An informed wait is shorter than an uninformed wait.

If stores are being informed of the date of service, your overall expectation of the store level is kept in check, which leads to better service and feedback. It’s really important for vendors to update work orders with schedule dates. We’re trying to get contractors and partners to accept that it’s not only important to go to the store to fix the issue. Communication is important. That level of communication is reflected in these reports. The more our industry integrates these reports into service delivery, the overall level of compliance and sophistication will increase and the industry as a whole will progress.

The end result is not always about finding the cheapest or lowest cost provider, but finding the happy-medium between cost and performance. To do this, you need Vendor Scorecarding.

What other methods do you feel can increase compliance more easily?
Please share your public comments below, or e-mail me privately.