An Outline of Your Expectations: Why Scope of Work is Important for Outsourced Facility Maintenance Services
Contributed by Ed Turbeville
The facility maintenance service industry is emerging as a fast growing sector due to the increasing demand for maintaining clean, safe, and healthy workplaces. With its multi-disciplinary nature, the facility maintenance function includes a wide range of responsibilities and processes. It is therefore crucial to ensure that the service provider and customer have a clear understanding of the program scope. However, many businesses enter facility maintenance contracts with inadequately defined scope of work that leads to ambiguity on the obligations and deliverables for the service provider. As a result, the outsourced program will not have the capacity to fulfill customer requirements set forth in the contract.
“The Scope of Work (SOW) is the area in an agreement where the work to be performed is described. The SOW should contain any milestones, reports, deliverables, and end products that are expected to be provided by the performing party. The SOW should also contain a timeline for all deliverables.” – New York University
Several facility maintenance companies tend to overlook the significance of scope of work due to their concentration only on program objectives to achieve. For a long-term perspective and clarity on service delivery, it is critical to prepare a comprehensive scope of work that outlines the program outcomes along with tasks and their frequency, program milestones, customer expectations, and all other pertinent information that will support the outsourced program to operate effectively, harmoniously, and efficiently. It calls for the service provider to gain an in-depth understanding of all dimensions of the customer’s business including operations, vision, objectives, and core competency, among others. Similarly, scope of work also necessitates the service provider to have detailed knowledge of the customer facility. In addition to the general guidelines on conducting day-to-day operations, some key components for a facility maintenance scope of work document include detailed duties and responsibilities for the on-ground team, list of integrated services to be provided, personnel information, details of the account management team for the customer, SOPs and KPIs, all locations where the services will be provided, plan to implement the transition phase, compliance guidelines, and the customer’s requirements.
Diversified Maintenance designs custom facility maintenance programs that are based on customer-specific scope of work with detailed requirements, quality assurance strategy, customer expectations, and other special considerations. To learn more about the benefits of a scope of work document and its impact on the long-term success of an outsourced facility maintenance program, send me a note at: Ed Turbeville eturbeville@diversifiedm.com
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