Get Your Fix: Developing Efficient Cost Management and Containment Strategies

 

When their facilities are experiencing an issue, most commercial business owners or managers simply hand off the work to the company in charge of managing the building.

However, there’s a lot more work to these projects than meets the eye. For instance, how are these repair and maintenance projects priced? How do companies balance the need for high quality work with fair costs for all parties involved?

Vixxo’s Brian Monticello and Brett Jannsen met with host Daniel Litwin to shed some light on these challenges. Monticello is the Senior Director of Supply Chain Management at the company, while Jannsen is the Vice President of Supply Chain Analytics, allowing both of them to provide insight on this often-overlooked aspect of facilities management.

The average commercial client may have no idea what’s a good price and what is not a good price for their maintenance or repair project, Jannsen said. Some of these costs, like material expenses and service fees, are more nuanced than labor rates and can be hard to understand from the client’s perspective.

“When possible, we try to standardize costs, so it becomes easier for us to manage the service providers and, more importantly, it’s easier for customers to understand how they’re paying and assess whether or not something’s fair and reasonable,” Monticello said. “There are industry standards for certain jobs, but those are just really high-level guidelines, because you need to take into account the context. … You don’t know until you’re there and you see that specific situation.”

Subscribe to the Get Your Fix podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify for more insights and thought leadership on facilities management.

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