By Tim McLean
Facilities Management teams can play a strategic role in corporate success. Accruent offers its sixth of seven tips to helping Facilities Management teams save time, costs, and energy to become a strategic contributor: Connect with Vendors.

Connect with Vendors

As a facilities management team, you have to involve your vendors because of their importance to your overall process. Organizations today are extending the reach of their facilities teams by engaging vendors for special repairs or remote locations. The concept is powerful and provides your organization with a virtual workforce. However, the process becomes labor-intensive and costly to manage manually.

A cloud system provides a direct connection to your whole facilities family. Vendors can be set up within the system as an assignable crew with:
• Automated notifications
• Secure access to view and update the status of their specific work assigned
• Tracked performance against user-defined SLAs
• The ability to track detailed customer satisfaction, just as you would with any of your in-house crews

Accruent - Blog Post - Facilities Management as a Strategic Contributor: Connect with Vendors

The result is faster service, accurate customer satisfaction, accurate completion details to support invoice payments, and more useful information for evaluating vendor performance in contract negotiations.

Additional Opportunities for Facilities Management Teams

Automating vendor relationships is just one way facility maintenance management teams can play a strategic role in their company. Read previous blog posts to learn about our first five tips in the series, and stay tuned for next week’s post on our final tip of the series on becoming a strategic contributor.

Accruent’s white paper, “From Cost Center to Strategic Contributor: How Facilities Management teams Can Play a More Strategic Role in Organizations,” provides insight into how FM teams can drive profitability from their department, whether it’s leveraging automated processes or using reporting to make maintenance decisions. Download your copy of the white paper today.
In addition, the webinar “7 Ways Your FM Team Can Be More Strategic” hosted by Tim McLean is now available online. If you would like to watch the recording, please visit the Vimeo using the password FM2014.

Other blog posts in this series: