Innovative procurement design for facility management services

We introduce a multi-attribute auction-based mechanism with an endogenous scoring rule as a mean to innovate procurement design related to outsourcing of facility management (FM) activities in private and public sectors. The mechanism allows the procurer to request bids on several measurable technical and economic attributes of the supply of FM services, detailed in the procurement contract. The procurer also assigns weights to such features to signal their relevance to the sellers, while the score obtained with respect to any attribute is endogenously determined on the basis of the submitted offers. The proposed mechanism allows the procurer to mitigate the most relevant drawbacks due to the lack of skills and crucial information on the outsourced non-core activities. In fact, on one hand, it can extract from suppliers valuable private technical knowledge as well as information on the supply cost, and, on the other hand, it save the procurer from supporting the effort to specify ex ante both the exact required value for any technical feature of the supply, and the way a specific offer is scored.