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A road-map for outsourcing facilities-related services in SMEs

Overcome criticalities and build trust
Roberto Cigolini, Giovanni Miragliotta and Margherita Pero
Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to focus on the outsourcing facilities management (FM) services in small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Design/methodology/approach The paper employs a Dene-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) methodology. A survey in Italy, a country quite representative when talking about SMEs, is rst presented and evidence from the eld is discussed. Stemming from the evidence, a road-map is presented to overcome these criticalities and to support, also in SMEs, the diffusion of the outsourcing of the FM services, whose benets in terms of higher efciency and better service are already being experienced by larger companies. The proposed model is then validated through the extensive survey on small and medium-sized Italian enterprises. Findings The survey shows that the current level of adoption of advanced outsourcing practices is very low: less than 5 percent of the companies in the sample resort to a single supplier delivering multiple FM services. The adoption rate of such practices is hence very low, and the survey has pointed out three different levels of causes: size-related, cultural, and managerial. Research limitations/implications The survey used in this paper is based on a questionnaire but does not consider non-respondents. The database of companies provided by IFMA Italian Chapter could also possibly introduce bias. Practical implications Starting with the early recognition that the main problem in the eld implementations of result-oriented approaches lies in determining whether the expected results have been achieved and that two key tools are available (i.e. the service level agreement and the reporting system), the model suggests a new organizational and managerial structure, even simpler than the traditional (i.e. not integrated) approach. To design the kernel of the control system, DMAIC has been used, after a specic customization. Social implications Results show a widespread outsourcing of the facilities-related services in the larger organizations and some hurdles of the smaller ones in exploiting all the opportunities offered, so that on average the management of facilities-related services represents an opportunity to exploit rather than an actually implemented methodology. Originality/value Only a few international contributions refer to local environments: here an extensive survey involving more than 1,000 Italian companies is presented. Keywords Multi-service, Result-oriented, Outsourcing, Six Sigma, Survey, Facilities, Small to medium-sized enterprises, Italy Paper type Conceptual paper

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1. Introduction
Outsourcing refers to the situations where an organization contracts with another organization for the provision of a service that could equally be provided by a person, unit or department within the organization that requires the service (Best et al., 2003; Barret, 1995; Barret, 2000).
Facilities Vol. 29 No. 11/12, 2011 pp. 445-458 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0263-2772 DOI 10.1108/02632771111157123

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Outsourcing practices have been recognized to have advantages, e.g. higher quality of service, lower cost of services in the long term, a gain specialist expertise and skills that are not available in-house, managers have more time to concentrate on higher priorities, as well as disadvantages, e.g. perceived loss of control, transaction costs (e.g. the cost of searching for possible suppliers, tendering), monitoring costs (e.g. if outsourced suppliers require more monitoring than in-house), security risks/threats to condentiality, loss of in-house skills/expertise (Hassanain and Al-Saadi, 2005). Over the last decade, outsourcing has become one of the major issues in many disciplines and in different sectors. Organizations performing a wide range of asset management functions have adopted outsourcing practices (Klammt, 2001). Researchers have investigated the practice of outsourcing in the health care sector in different countries, among the others the USA (Roberts, 2001) and Italy (Macinati, 2008). In the USA, healthcare executives use outsourcing as a strategic tool to face the challenge of reducing costs while maintaining quality patient care. In the Italian health care sector, many criticalities hinder executives from fully exploiting outsourcing benets, i.e. the reasons for outsourcing, the characteristics of the outsourced services and the management of the relationship with the vendor. Outsourcing practices have been adopted in the realm of facility-related services too. The management of facilities-related services has basically originated from the eld experience. It was introduced early in 1975 (Maas and Pleunis, 2001) and the most relevant market growth took place during the 1980s in the USA, so that most of the organizational models come from the evolution directly driven from the market during the 1990s. Academic literature played a relatively passive role, in that the actual wide range of facilities-related services has not been suggested nor introduced by theoretical studies (Best et al., 2003). Some taxonomies of facilities-related services have been developed. Barret (1995) proposed two levels: the operational level involves short term and day-by-day activities; the strategic level addresses issues like property portfolio management, strategic property decision and facilities planning and development. Nutt (2002) suggests three levels, by adding a level in between those two of Barrets. Chotipanich (2004) amalgamated all the proposed lists of services coming from other studies (e.g. Cotts, 1999) in what should be as comprehensive a list as possible. Some researchers have investigated the outsourcing of facility-related services. Yik and Lai (2005) outline the recent emergence of the trend of outsourcing for building services operation and maintenance (O&M) work for commercial buildings in Honk Kong and highlight the benets building owners can obtain due to increase of competition in the service providers market. Hassanain and Al-Saadi (2005) investigate outsourcing of asset management services in the municipal sector and they propose a framework model composed of ve sequential steps for outsourcing asset management services: (1) identify asset management processes; (2) assess outsourcing of asset management services; (3) develop outsourcing contracts; (4) establish procedures for transfer of asset management functions; and (5) establish procedures for contract management.

Despite the relevance of the benets of such practices for companies, little is known on the outsourcing of facility management service in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). More generally, literature analysis shows that, in Europe, with the exception of UK and in The Netherlands (Hassanien and Losekoot, 2002), most of the European countries (including Italy see Cigolini et al., 2008) did not show a proactive awareness of the opportunities linked to the management of facilities-related services, and they did not develop an organizational model for their specic domestic markets (Gomez et al., 2008). When addressing the issue of facility-related services two main elements should be taken into account: (1) the relationship between the company and the service provider; and (2) the internal structure of the company that contracts the supplier. Friday (2003) and James and Mona (2004) focused on the relationship between a given company and the facilities-related services providers. These authors agree that organizational objectives usually vary according to different business environments for both the considered company and the facilities management department (Lee, 2002). Kenneth et al. (1999), Magee (1998), Piper (2002), Rondeau et al. (1995) studied in detail the link between a given company and its FM department: all of them agree on the importance of tailoring to the specic context (including national peculiarities) the strategy to manage facilities-related services, its organizational model and the relationships with suppliers. Atkin and Brooks (2000) stressed that understanding the organizational requirements is the key for an effective the management of facilities-related services, while Barret (1995) showed that an FM department poorly linked to corporate divisions leads to ineffective facilities-related management practices that are unable to support at their best the overall companys strategy. Fewer international contributions are referred to local environments. Referring to ` Italy, Noe and Sorrenti (2006) studied a sophisticated relationship between a given company and the facilities-related services providers under a wide denition of facilities management that includes most of the no-core services and even services not tightly linked to buildings and real estate. These authors pointed out that small and medium enterprises by comparison to the larger ones use fewer services per capita with a lower quality and higher costs. The literature review suggests that SMEs, on the one hand, can benet from proper managing facility-related service, on the other hand, might experience strong hurdles in structuring the internal organization to fully exploit the benets of outsourcing of facility-related service. However, there is still need for research in this area. Therefore, this paper aims at investigating the level of adoption of outsourcing practice for facility management services in SMEs, and what are the benets and hurdles companies face in outsourcing. To this end, a survey among Italian SMEs has been performed. The survey outlines the low diffusion of facility management service outsourcing practice in the Italian SMEs and a number of hurdles to such an implementation. Therefore, a roadmap for SMEs to overcome these hurdles has been developed and here presented. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 presents the methodology used to perform the survey and the main results. In particular, the main hurdles to outsourcing facility management related services are presented. In section 3 the roadmap is described. Finally, in section 4 conclusions and directions for future research are draw out.

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2. The survey 2.1 Objectives To investigate whether Italian companies are aware of outsourcing opportunities in FM, an extensive survey on small and medium enterprises has been performed. In particular, the survey was aimed at providing insights on the penetration level of outsourcing practices in SMEs, and what are the main benets and hurdles to its implementation in the SMEs. 2.2 Methodology A questionnaire issued by IFMA Italian Chapter has been distributed over to a representative sample of SMEs. In particular, a sample of Italian SMEs has been selected. To this purpose besides SMEs according to the European standard (i.e. Companies with less than 250 employees and an annual turnover not greater than 40 million Euro), also companies with more than 250 employees but less than 40 million Euro turnover and companies with less than 50 employees and more than 7 million Euro turnover have been considered. As a result, a sample of 1,184 companies has been extracted from the IFMA Italian Chapter database including around 20,000 rms. This sample has been further split into three sections: (1) A SMEs with fewer than 100 employees and companies with fewer than 50 employees, but more than 7 million Euro turnover; (2) B SMEs with employees ranging between 101 and 250; and (3) C companies (i.e. outside the SMEs domain according to the European standard) with more than 250 employees and a turnover smaller than 40 million Euro. Furthermore, the questionnaire was divided into the following ve sections: (1) Company section, where information about the company and its main characteristics is collected: e.g. name, industry, turnover, employees, etc. (2) Services section, where information on how facilities-related services are managed is collected: e.g. whether a department devoted to facilities-related services is present, when it has established, whether it is managed by a facilities manager, how outsourcing is used etc. (3) Internally produced services section, aimed at understanding why facilities-related services have not been outsourced. (4) Externally produced services section, where the outsourced services are investigated through questions on why services have been outsourced, on the contract type. etc. (5) Global assessment section, where a comprehensive assessment of the facilities management department is asked for both outsourced and in-house produced services. To minimize the number of ambiguous answers, only multiple-choice questions were asked with a scale ranging from 1 (completely unsatised) to 6 (totally satised). The questionnaire has been warmed out through some interviews to opinion leaders; then all the selected enterprises where contacted: in a week, 133 companies replied and in approximately one month all the questionnaires were collected.

2.3 Introducing results Firm size is strongly linked to the choice of outsourcing facility management activities. In fact, results show a widespread outsourcing of the facilities-related services in the larger organizations, whereas the majority of A-section and B-section companies usually do not outsource FM services, due to their reduced size. Despite the practice of outsourcing is not widespread, survey results show the importance of the potential savings SMEs could benet by better managing facility and exploiting outsourcing. In fact, collected data show that the average cost of facilities-related services represents 3.45 percent of the turnover. A negative cost trend can be identied by moving from A-section to C-section companies: very small companies spend more than the average, and potential cost reduction should be investigated with deeper details for this category. On the other hand, larger companies spend less than the mean value as a result of a better general management, which can be related to the proper adoption and implementation of outsourcing. Smaller companies experience more hurdles in exploiting all the opportunities offered by outsourcing. In particular, three main categories of hurdles can be identied; ranking them from the highest level, most structural ones to the lowest level, contingent ones, the three categories are Size-dependent factors, cultural factors and managerial factors. In Table I the main results related to each category is presented. 2.4 Category 1: size-dependent factors With the expression size dependent factors we want to emphasize those objective factors which are due to the limited size and resources of a SME. Due to these factual constraints, SMEs have a tendency not to have a organizational unit dedicated to facility management. In fact the three categories of enterprises exhibit relevant differences in terms of presence of a dedicated FM department: the number of companies provided with an organizational unit dedicated to FM increase from A-section to C-section: nearly all the largest companies (of the specic sample) manage facilities-related services with a dedicated structure. Nearly all the C-section companies have a dedicated organizational unit for facilities management, even though only a few of them name this unit as FM department; even B-section companies are moving toward this approach, while A-section companies prefer not to use a dedicated department to facilities, maybe for the lack for human resources due to their limited number of employees. Reduced business size is declared as the main reason for which A-section companies internally produce facilities-related services, while the surplus of
Category Size-dependent Cultural Factors limiting the outsourcing of FM services Limited resources Lack of an organizational unit dedicated to facility management Lack of trust between buyer-supplier Non-cooperative mindset Change aversion Lack of up-to-date managerial approaches Lack of KPI dashboards Unstructured suppliers selection process

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Managerial

Table I. Main hurdles to outsourcing FM services in SMEs

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employees is the most important motivation for which B-section companies do not outsource services. The absence of a FM department, or even of a facilities manager position, represents the rst hurdle to outsource FM-related services, since it is very difcult to engage for an outsourced relationship when the main internal shareholder of such relationship is lacking. 2.5 Category 2: cultural factors According to the survey, the lack of trust is the one of main barriers for most of A-section companies, probably because they fear the supplier will access to information other than the one strictly required to deliver the service. The companies in the sample, moreover, show a non-cooperative mindset and tenders are the main way to select suppliers; contracts are usually task-oriented with a very limited duration. All these elements prevent the suppliers from investing on the customer. The number of outsourced services is signicantly various and the result-oriented contracts are not very popular, since most of the interviewed companies prefer to sign task-oriented contracts, that are considered easier to manage. Furthermore, while B-section and C-section companies are looking for lean organization, A-section companies do not formally allocate budget to outsourced service, even though they are afrm to be aware of the opportunity offered by outsourcing at least some services. These ndings conrm also the nature of Italian SMEs, with a strong change aversion behavior, which nevertheless can be considered as a common characteristic of many SMEs. For instance, the usage of result-oriented contracts and single-supplier approaches is very limited: a unique supplier is present only in 9 percent of the C-section enterprises, and this gure get worst if we consider A-section enterprises (only 5 percent), and most of the companies in the sample declared that they actually were not aware of the multi-service single-supplier approach. 2.6. Category 3: managerial factors The survey showed other reasons that prevent rms from outsourcing FM services, namely the supplier selection process and the performance assessment systems. The suppliers selection process is mainly unstructured: for A-section enterprises, suppliers are widely selected by word-of-mouth, while B-section enterprises support their supplier selection following suggestions of word-of-mouth; C-section companies are provided with the highest utilization rate of e-procurement approach and, in some cases, with corporate international agreements about suppliers selection. Nevertheless, the most widespread approach to nd suppliers for all the enterprises of the sample is represented by tenders, even though the larger the enterprise, the less tenders are used. All the considered B-section enterprises check results to assess the opportunity to conrm the supplier; within C-section enterprises, the service level control increases due to their higher orientation to achieve adequate service quality and customer satisfaction and to exploit their bargaining power when renegotiating the contract; no relevant differences emerges between B-section and A-section enterprises, given that the type of services and the industry have a signicant effect on the control process. Unfortunately, very few companies dene a dashboard of performance indicators: the adoption of dashboards becomes relevant only in the C-section enterprises. Since the presence of a suitable suppliers performance measurement system is a necessary

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condition for developing result-oriented contracts, we understand why result-oriented contracts are not popular, and task-oriented contracts still represent the standard way of buying FM services. 3. A roadmap for outsourcing FM related services in SMEs According to the evidences of the survey, we understand that three kind of barriers have to be overcome in order to increase the utilization of outsourcing FM services in SMEs. This section illustrates a roadmap to progressively deal with these barriers, and to help SMEs to know business stemming from the outsourcing practices, and start a thorough protability evaluation process concerning the insource and outsource alternatives. For the sake of convenience, the roadmap is presented from the lowest level to the highest level barriers, hence rst managerial, then cultural and eventually size-dependent factors, according to the assumption that the inertia of a small company in dealing with such barriers is increasing with their level. 3.1 Dealing with managerial factors According to the survey, the lack of up-to-date managerial tools, of KPI dashboards and the unstructured suppliers selection process are the main issues to be considered at the managerial level. To overcome this, a managerial approach has to be sought for, which is easy to be taught and understood by managers of SMEs, comprehensive, i.e. able to encompass all the aspects of building and evaluating an outsourced FM relationship, and formally rigorous, so as to represent an opportunity to increase the overall managerial capability of that company. Broadly speaking, we think that the Dene-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) methodology, rst introduced within the Six Sigma framework (Pyzdek, 2003), could be the right choice, and up to the task. This methodology has several strengths, its simplicity and its widespread knowledge being the most relevant ones in this situation: it requires a small training investment and it can be applied to several managerial issues other from the design of outsourced FM services, thus reducing the adoption barriers in a SME-environment. Within the Dene step the outsourcing relationship is set up: the project team is selected, activities are identied and scheduled with the required resources and the expected overall project duration. So, the standpoint lies in identifying business processes and in collecting data on maintenance, procedures, costs etc. Unfortunately these data are seldom available to the project team and often they are not properly embedded in the appropriate framework, so that the project team has to take care of the data acquisition to develop the so-called as-is description of the processes. A benchmark with similar rms is often required to compare the as-is description to the market and to identify best practices. Besides costs and processes, the appropriate service level for an effective continuous improvement has to be pinpointed: few companies have an explicit internal customer satisfaction system designed to measure the quality of the internally supplied services; therefore, the project team has to acquire, or assume, the missing information. Once all the data are properly collected, a gap analysis has to be carried out, to identify services to improve, to reengineer, to develop etc. Customer and supplier have to agree on a set of target performances, i.e. to dene the expected service level for each

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service and the key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure and to control them. At this time all the data needed to dene up the service level agreement should be available, i.e. organizational interfaces between the customer company and the supplier, list of the required services, objectives and description for each service, target service level, bonuses and penalties etc. The outsourcing relationship can be implemented through a denition of an execution plan with a projected transition period (e.g. six-eight months) during which all the processes and activities can be tested and validated in tight collaboration with the supplier. During the transition period, the involved buildings and the related equipment are worthy to be surveyed (Lewis, 1999; Petrocelly and Thumann, 2000), e.g. by labeling components with barcodes to ensure the measurement process to be easy, quick, accurate and reliable. During the operative phase of the outsourcing contract, the Measure step collects all the required data to feed the information system, e.g. activities plan, customer satisfaction, performed actions, inspections and audits etc. In this way, by comparing the scheduled maintenance plan to the actually performed activities, the planning conformity of the supplier can be checked. Notice that as a prerequisite the data collection should be integrated with the activities (Barnes et al., 2004): as soon as a service is delivered, all the data should be collected: after a call for service, the time the call is received, the arrival time on site and the time the open issue is closed should be recorded. In this way, KPIs at different levels of aggregation (by building, by service, by customer, by supplier etc.) can be calculated and the related indexes can be used both either by the company customer to monitor the supplier or by the supplier to monitor subcontractors, if needed. The Analyze step assesses the gaps between required and actually supplied service level, to highlight criticisms and improvement areas: agreed service levels sometimes reveal to be too ambitious, or an agreed indicator can be misleading, e.g. in the cleaning service, where the perceived performance are very subjective and often an outstanding average customer satisfaction is hard to achieve. A deep analysis of the gaps and their distribution can also provide a better understanding of the studied services, by allowing the taking advantage by synergies coming from the integrated management. The Improve step develops a strategy to ne-tune service levels or merely to continuously improve overall performance. Remarkable expertise and skills are needed, and they should be provided by both customer company and supplier, while the steering committee should support collaboration to achieve all the agreed targets. In this way, kaizen (Imai, 1985) can be implemented: e.g. when an obsolete system becomes too expensive to maintain, the supplier could agree on taking the required investment, while the customer company could agree on granting a monthly fee and an extension of the contract, thus converting an investment into a running cost. The nal step of the DMAIC methodology has the purpose to Control the improvements developed in the previous step: the steering committee checks both the effectiveness of the implemented changes and the ability of the overall system to achieve the agreed target performance. Whenever an inconsistency or an infeasibility is found, you are required to go back to the Improve step to develop a new strategy, by taking into account the lessons learnt. The steering committee generates reports of the performed activities to standardize the revised version of the process and of the related activities. This managerial approach can be used by SME managers at the very operative level in order to dene, implement and improve their outsourcing practices. Its simplicity

and effectiveness can help to bridge the gap between the poor performance measurement and suppliers selection practices observed in eld, and what would be needed to implement a FM outsourcing contract. 3.2 Dealing with cultural factors Shifting to cultural factors, the situation becomes a little bit more complex, since one has now to face the lack of trust between buyer and supplier and the non-cooperative mindset which are quite widespread in SMEs. Due to such culture, the usage of spot, task-oriented contracts and tenders today represents the standard way of purchasing FM services in SMEs. In this regard, a twofold step can be thought of: in the rst step, a shift from a task-oriented to a result-oriented contract policy can be fostered: in this way, the customer and the supplier set a common purpose, i.e. the focus of the agreement is moved from the provision of a service to the result granted (Greaver, 1998): e.g. the well-known air-conditioning service, under a result-oriented approach can be managed by agreeing on the desired temperature and humidity instead of on the frequency of regulations and maintenance interventions, as under a traditional approach. This rst step is useful to increase the trust between the buyer and the supplier, who is in charge not simply of doing something rather of achieving something. A way to build mutual trust between the buyer and the service supplier is that of working together on the denition of the results on which to establish the result-oriented contract. This has to be done a two levels: at the rst level (the most important one) they have to nd the right performances to measure (in terms of importance and current satisfaction level); this can be done using the approach suggested by Hayes (2000), and illustrated in Figure 1. In this way, the current perceived service quality is combined with the importance given to each service by the customer, and a prioritized work-list is dened. Of course, this task is easier done when the measurement of the service level linked to a certain service is easy to measure: the air conditioning is a good example for that, while the

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Figure 1. The satisfaction vs importance matrix

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already mentioned cleaning service is more likely to remain on a task-oriented basis (clean any room every xx hours). The second step, then, is to move from a traditional result-oriented approach with a different supplier for each service, each with its own specic result-oriented contract, to an integrated multi-service result-oriented approach, where a single supplier is responsible for providing all the needed services (Cigolini, 2009). Figure 2 compares the high-level information ow in the multi-supplier case to the single supplier case, and highlights the greater simplicity in the former situation. This second step is very important in building further trust between the buyer and the service provider, abandoning the spot contracts in favor of a more stable relationship. Above all, this allows the increase of the overall perceived service quality because, by choosing a single supplier, larger transaction-specic investments can be done to improve the relationship. For example, Figure 3 illustrates the typical organizational setup and detailed information ow in case of an integrated multi-service result-oriented approach: the increase in the number of provided services allows a more formalized coordination process (with a joint steering committee), and for a more effective communication infrastructure between the nal customers and the service provider (usually managed through a call center). The advantages represented by the reduced complexity of the relationship (with respect to several single-supplier service contracts), by the higher participation in the service design and by the better communication infrastructure are likely to overcome, in a mid-term roadmap, the cultural aversion to cooperation.

Figure 2. High-level information ow under a traditional (A) and a multi-service result-oriented (B) approach

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Figure 3. Detailed information ows under the integrated multi-service result-oriented approach

3.4 Dealing with size-dependent factors This last level in the roadmap is the most difcult to be addressed, both because it is an objective hurdle (SMEs have really limited resources and quite unstructured organizations), and because it is a pre-requisite for the other two: as the survey showed, in fact, SMEs generally do not have a dedicated FM department, and sometimes also an internal key account acting as a facilities manager is missing. Without this role, one of the two ends of the dyadic relationship is missing and the whole setup is possibly unfeasible. So, how to overcome these facts? As a matter of fact, in a multi-service result-oriented FM relationship, the larger company between the multi-service supplier and the SME customer is, very often, the supplier: its larger size allows for a more structured organization, and a higher capability for investments in communication and business development. According to this intuition, a way to overcome the size-dependent barriers could be leveraging on the FM service provides, and their business attitude. Some actions that could be done by suppliers toward prospective SME customers are: . Communication events, so as to illustrate the operational advantages of outsourcing FM activities, and to illustrate the functioning of the integrated multi-service result-oriented approach. . Training sessions, aimed at training those manager(s) in the SME whose responsibilities are closer to the eld of FM so that they could assume the role of facilities manager. This action is very important, and will create the organizational conditions to open a business relationship in the near future. These actions radically change the role of the FM service supplier, from a passive entity in the SME arena to an active player, who is aware of the inherent (and often

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objective) limitations of its counterparts and acts in order to minimize and reduce them, with a short-term perspective. 4. Conclusions and future research In this paper, we studied the subject of outsourcing FM services in an SME environment. After a comprehensive review which introduced the papers main topic, a survey has been presented concerning the adoption of FM outsourcing practices among Italian SMEs. The survey shows that the current level of adoption of advanced outsourcing practices is very low: less than 5 percent of the companies in the sample resort to a single supplier delivering multiple FM services. The adoption rate of such practices is hence very low, and the survey has pointed out three different levels of reasons: size-related, cultural and managerial causes. Leveraging on this evidence, the paper has proposed a deliberated roadmap to overcome these barriers, starting from local actions (at the managerial and cultural levels) up to cross-company actions (at the size-dependent level). In particular, a new role of FM suppliers is proposed: the FM suppliers should assume a proactive role in the relationship with the SMEs. Moreover, a cultural change is advocated in the SMEs. They should embrace Six Sigma philosophy and apply it to FM. The proposed roadmap is innovative, since it emphasizes a set of action that have to be done by SMEs, but without neglecting those objective limitations in SMEs organizational and investment capabilities; hence it suggests some actions to be done by FM service providers in order to spread knowledge and to create a suitable organizational background for advanced outsourcing practices, such as the result-oriented multi-service ones. This roadmap is based on the evidences of the survey, but still lacks of an empirical validation, which is likely to be done by means of case studies and action research. Action research can be used to analyze the feasibility of the roadmap in SMEs, along with the benets and the main hurdles SMEs are experiencing for its implementation. A toolbox for the implementation of the roadmap can be derived. Future research will also be focused on the new role of the supplier in the buyer-supplier relationship. Finally we acknowledge that the survey has been conducted only on Italian SMEs, therefore further research might be needed to compare the results draw out for Italy to other countries.
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Cigolini, R. (2009), Facility management outsourcing and contracting overview, in Cigolini, R., Deshmukh, A., Fedele, L. and McComb, S. (Eds), Recent Advances in Maintenance and Infrastructure Management, Springer, London, pp. 225-31. Cigolini, R., Fedele, L. and Villa, A.N. (2008), Managing facilities under the multi-service result-oriented approach: some insights coming from the eld in Italy, Production Planning and Control, Vol. 19 No. 4, pp. 312-26. Cotts, D.G. (1999), The Facility Management Handbook, 2nd ed., Amacom Press, New York, NY. Friday, S. (2003), Organization Development for Facility Managers, Amacom, New York, NY. Gomez, A.H., Huber, M. and Schachner, M. (2008), Controlling costs in European asset management, The McKinsey Quarterly, Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 1-5. Greaver, M.F. (1998), Strategic Outsourcing: A Structured Approach to Outsourcing Decision and Initiatives, Amacom, New York, NY. Hassanain, M.A. and Al-Saadi, S. (2005), A framework model for outsourcing asset management services, Facilities, Vol. 23 Nos 1/2, pp. 73-81. Hassanien, A. and Losekoot, E. (2002), The application of facilities management expertise to the hotel renovation process, Facilities, Vol. 20 Nos 7/8, pp. 230-8. Hayes, B.E. (2008), Measuring Customer Satsifaction and Loyalty, ASQ Quality Press, Milwaukee, WI. Imai, M. (1985), Kaizen: The Key to Japans Competitive Success, The Kaizen Institute, Lucerne. James, A. and Mona, J. (2004), Service Management: Operations, Strategy and Information Technology, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. Kenneth, L., Petrocelly, A. and Thumann, A. (1999), Facilities Evaluation Handbook, Fairmont Press, Lilburn, GA. Klammt, F.J. (2001), Guide to FM Outsourcing, e-book, available at: www.aptek.net/Book/intro/ preview.pdf Lee, W. (2002), The role of support services and FM in the introduction of change management, in Reuvid, J. and Hinks, J. (Eds), Managing Business Support Services, 2nd ed., Kogan Page, London. Lewis, B.T. (1999), Facility Managers Operation and Maintenance Handbook, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. Maas, G.W.A. and Pleunis, J.W. (2001), Facility Management, Kluwer, New York, NY. Macinati, M.S. (2008), Outsourcing in the Italian national health service: ndings from a national survey, International Journal of Health Planning and Management, Vol. 23 No. 1, pp. 21-36. Magee, G.H. (1998), Facilities Maintenance Management, R.S. Means Publishers, Kingston, MA. ` Noe, C. and Sorrenti, D. (2006), Extensive global service (EGS): drawing of an analysis model, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Maintenance and Facility Management, Sorrento, Italy, April 27/28, pp. 249-56. Nutt, B. (2002), The essence and value of facility management, in Chotipanich, S. (Ed.), Facility Management Thailand, 2002, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. Petrocelly, K.L. and Thumann, P.E. (2000), Facilities Evaluation Handbook, 2nd ed., The Fairmont Press, Liburn, GA. Piper, J.E. (2002), Handbook of Facility Management, BNI Publications, Los Angeles, CA. Pyzdek, T. (2003), The Six Sigma Project Planner: A Step-by-step Guide to Leading a Six Sigma Project through DMAIC, McGraw-Hill, Maidenhead.

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Roberts, V. (2001), Managing strategic outsourcing in the healthcare industry, Journal of Healthcare Management, Vol. 46 No. 4, pp. 239-49. Rondeau, E.P., Brown, R.K. and Lapides, P.D. (1995), Facility Management, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. Yik, F.W.H. and Lai, J.H.K. (2005), The trend of outsourcing for building services operation and maintenance in Hong Kong, Facilities, Vol. 23 Nos 1/2, pp. 63-72. Further reading Ciarapica, F.E., Giacchetta, G. and Paciarotti, C. (2008), Facility management in the healthcare sector: analysis of the Italian situation, Production Planning and Control, Vol. 19 No. 4, pp. 327-41. Owen, D.D. (1993), Facilities Planning and Relocation, R.S. Means Publishers, Kingston, MA. Quinn, J.B. and Hilmer, F.G. (1995), Strategic outsourcing, The McKinsey Quarterly, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 48-70. Radharamanan, R. and Godoy, L.P. (1999), Quality function deployment as applied to a health care system, Computers and Industrial Engineering, Vol. 31 Nos 1-2, pp. 443-6. Corresponding author Roberto Cigolini can be contacted at: roberto.cigolini@polimi.it

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