Expert articles on tendering, procurement and quality assurance of facility management services.
Free choice of procedure, a threshold of 750,000 euros and twenty per cent room for modification: what the special regime for specific services grants, where it pays off, and why the tribunals have decided inconsistently.
A contractor’s own inspections are necessary and no use as evidence. Four places where they systematically flatter the picture, the structural limit behind that, and why the divergence from the client’s inspection is the finding that matters.
Monthly and annual services are missed most often, because a missed one has no visible outcome. Why the usual quality inspection does not capture them and how an interval becomes a verifiable schedule.
The sample decides everything that follows. How a walk-through becomes a robust inspection, why acceptance sampling to DIN ISO 2859-1 needs its own adaptation, and what the ancillary rooms reveal about a building.
Presence is the easiest thing to check and says the least. Seven other things carry a performance inspection in security services, from the operating instructions through the occurrence book to the staffing check.
Healthcare, communal facilities and food areas follow three separate sets of rules that can meet in the same building. What distinguishes them and what that means for lots, suitability and the cleaning concept.
Four damage patterns we assess again and again, and what they say about their cause. Plus the distinction between soiling, wear and damage, and what can be secured before the dispute begins.
What belongs in a defensible economic appraisal: four cost blocks, the difference between public sector and trades pay by increment, productive rather than paid hours, and the productivity rate that matters more than the hourly wage.
How a security concept comes about: establish what is at risk, define what is to be protected, describe how. This article sets out the three steps in detail and the transitions between them, where most concepts founder.
What does procurement advisory cost? When does it make sense? How does the collaboration work in practice? This article answers the questions that public and private contracting authorities most commonly face before a procurement procedure — directly, honestly and without evasion.
Patrol rounds in publicly accessible areas require the competence examination, and that catches schools, hospitals and courts. Why the instruction course is too little in many specifications and where the requirement belongs.
A change of contractor rarely fails because of the new contractor but because of what went unresolved beforehand. Lead time, transfer of undertaking, handover of knowledge, record of condition and overlap, plus a checklist for the last eight weeks.
Areas, interval and productivity rate give a requirement in hours. What regularly goes missing is the time beside the area: travel, trips to the store, set-up times and breaks. Plus the question of what a productivity rate actually covers.
What has to happen in the weeks before and after the start of service, in five phases. From the readiness check through the documented record of condition on handover day to staged inspections in the first eight weeks.
The first four weeks decide whether a new member of staff stays and whether they understand the building. What has to happen on day one, where the line runs between deepening and mandatory knowledge, and which questions belong at week four.
Training happens, it gets documented, and nothing changes in the building. Why: format, timing and abstraction, plus the constraint that beats any training where the time for what was taught is not costed.
Which sustainability criteria actually work in a cleaning tender: products and eco-labels, dosing, machines, daytime cleaning. And why where a criterion sits in the procedure decides whether it still applies after the award.
In security services the strongest levers sit with working conditions, not with environmental management. Qualification, pay, shift arrangements and turnover, plus the new framework under the Federal Collective Agreement Compliance Act.
Five weak points we keep finding when reviewing existing security concepts: threats lifted from a template, protection objectives that cannot be verified, measures that ignore how the building runs, missing reporting chains, and concepts never updated.
Most problems in cleaning contracts don't begin at the execution stage – they're embedded in the tender documents from the start. Knowing where specifications typically fall short is the first step toward avoiding costly disputes down the line.
Under settled German case law, cleaning contracts are classified as works contracts (Werkvertrag) — what is owed is a clean result, not a set number of working hours. Yet in practice, clients regularly reduce invoices on the grounds that contracted or estimated hours were not delivered. Whether such deductions hold up legally depends less on how the contract is labelled and more on three specific questions: Were the hours expressly agreed as a binding performance obligation? Is the reduction clause sufficiently transparent? And does it survive scrutiny under Germany's standard terms control regime? This article maps the relevant case law — from the 2019 Federal Court of Justice judgment to the diverging Court of Appeal rulings from Hamm, Düsseldorf, and Cologne.
When security services are put out to tender, the quality, reliability and overall security standard of the future service are determined long before the first shift begins. A precise specification, realistic timing and award criteria that go beyond price alone are the foundation of a professional and resilient procurement process.
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