In January of 2020, Ingrid Fenn, President & CEO of SIREAS, participated in a panel that discussed trends in outsourcing CRE & facilities services. The video below contains an excerpt from that discussion, and the following article summarizes her comments. This is the first installment of a seven part series.

SIREAS may be brought in to work with clients at various points in the development and implementation of CRE & facilities service delivery strategies. Sometimes we’re brought in only to provide outsourcing support. Sometimes, an organization is looking for help with a strategic supplier relationship that isn’t delivering the expected value. Those are just two examples. Most often, however, we’re asked to help from the inception of a strategic initiative to redesign an organization’s service delivery model. This process begins with a Current Environment Analysis.

Current Environment Analysis

A Current Environment Analysis is detailed research designed to answer many important and revealing questions, including:

• How are you delivering services today?
• How is your organization structured?
• What suppliers are you using and how are the contracts structured?
• What are your organization’s objectives?
• What volume of each service is being delivered?
• How much is it costing?

Depending on the size and complexity of your organization and the organization’s real estate portfolio, some of this information may be easily accessible. In some cases, however, it can be surprisingly difficult to acquire useful or accurate information. Even when you’ve collected the information, the work has only just begun.

The next step is to take that information and make it useful. Generally, information related to real estate and facilities services is collected and reported in a format that works for the departments that request it. Your finance department may be requesting certain information that works for financial reporting. Your management teams request information and metrics related to their particular management philosophy or that fit into broader measures of the organization’s success. Rarely are these reports created with rigorous industry benchmarking in mind. Without a clear understanding of how your data is structured and how those structures compare with those of the data you are benchmarking against, you won’t achieve the insight you seek.

Market Benchmark Analysis

We take the mystery out of it by organizing our clients’ data into a standard chart of accounts that we’ve designed to align with the benchmarks we use in our analysis. Once the data has been organized in this way, we can compare performance against our robust database of industry benchmarks to get a comprehensive view of the organization and its performance, and to identify all the opportunities to optimize service delivery. This sets the stage for organizational redesign, development of a service delivery strategy, sourcing required services, and implementation of a strategic relationship management and governance program.

What Do You Risk by Skipping the Current Environment Analysis?

What Do You Risk by Skipping the Current Environment Analysis?
Too often, organizations decide they can skip this analysis, believing that if they just go to market with a general inquiry, current “best practices” will provide enough guidance. But what do you risk with this approach?

• The responses you receive will be inconsistent in format and content
• This inconsistency will result in an inability to compare responses
• You won’t be able to assess the impact of the proposals on your internal and external resources
• You won’t have a full understanding as to whether what’s being proposed will adequately address your needs – and neither will the service provider

These are just some of the reasons why it is so important to start with a comprehensive understanding of your organization, your performance and where the gaps exist. Then you can go to the marketplace with a really good understanding of what your organization needs.

In our next installment, we’ll dig into how you align a service delivery model with how you define value in your organization.

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If you have a particular challenge or strategic initiative you would like to discuss, we invite you to schedule a call.