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Procurement Alignment Emerges As The Key To Breaking Reactive Facilities Operations Cycles
Joseph Bilik, Principal Advisor of FM Procurement and Supplier Strategy at Bluebird Procurement, explains why reactive facilities work often traces back to how procurement is structured and perceived.
Key Points
Many facilities teams remain stuck in reactive work cycles, driven less by a lack of tools and more by procurement functions that are undervalued and disconnected from daily operations.
Joseph Bilik, Principal Advisor of FM Procurement and Supplier Strategy at Bluebird Procurement, says siloed sites and fragmented sourcing prevent organizations from shifting toward proactive facilities management.
He explains how collaborative procurement models, predictable preventive maintenance spend, and active supplier performance management can stabilize budgets and protect operational continuity.
A lot of multi-site portfolios are really siloed into their sites, and so there’s little collaboration and little leverage of the overall combined opportunity.
Facilities teams stay stuck in reactive mode not because they lack discipline or tools, but because procurement sits too far from day-to-day operations. When sourcing decisions, vendor strategy, and budget ownership are treated as back-office functions, preventative work is the first thing to slip. With 75% of facility managers citing budget constraints as their top challenge, the conversation is shifting from tracking spend to protecting uptime. Procurement, when aligned with operations, becomes a lever for stability rather than a brake on progress.
Joseph Bilik, Principal Advisor of FM Procurement and Supplier Strategy at Bluebird Procurement, understands this disconnect deeply. At Bluebird, Bilik specializes in strategic sourcing for facilities services, vendor management, and cost reduction across large, multi-site portfolios. His industry experience also includes procurement and facilities optimization work at Prologis, Newmark, and CBRE. "A lot of multi-site portfolios are really siloed into their sites, and so there’s little collaboration and little leverage of the overall combined opportunity," says Bilik. "The facilities teams are overwhelmed, and that’s when reactive stuff happens because there’s no real formal proactive programming."
From clash to collaboration: According to Bilik, this reactive state is often a byproduct of local facilities teams focusing on their primary job: making sure the tenants and clients leasing their space are taken care of. The dynamic can create a conflict where the urgent needs of client service push important, long-term asset management to the back burner. At its core, Bilik says, the issue is rooted in perception. "The assumption is procurement comes in with a heavy hand, bangs its fist on the desk, and dictates a 'take it or leave it' decision on which supplier will be used," he explains. "My approach is very much a collaboration with the end facility operators and collaboratively coming up with partner solutions."
This operational disconnect is especially prevalent in organizations like real estate investment trusts (REITs) and private equity firms, where leadership can often prioritize brokering deals and maximizing top-line revenue. For these groups, Bilik notes, the "big opportunity" on the cost side is often overlooked.
Forecasting gold: Bilik's pitch to REITs and private equity is simple: contrast the volatility of reactive spending with the strategic advantage of predictability. "If you have a structured PM where you have predictable quarterly spend and you know 90% of that is what is going to be spent on an annual basis, that is gold for forecasting and budgeting," he explains. "On the flip side, if reactive work accounts for 50% of your spend, that is when the finance team starts throwing their toys, questioning why the budget is blown and how the facility is being managed."
Building a balance: For Bilik, the solution to this budgetary instability is active supplier performance management. It replaces a passive, "fingers crossed" hope for vendor compliance with a system of genuine accountability built on SLAs and KPIs. While he uses ticketing software tools to create data visibility, Bilik stresses that a successful approach balances quantitative metrics with qualitative on-the-ground feedback. "Any type of qualitative feedback the stakeholders can give as part of the review is definitely valuable," he says. "This feedback empowers them to be part of the solution, giving them a real say in supplier management and performance."
Ultimately, overcoming the historical "threat" of procurement hinges on creating a new operational structure built on mutual trust and shared data. "The modern view is this collaboration of a model where all parties are collaborating and sharing ideas," Bilik says. "As long as there's that mutual trust, that dialogue and collaboration, I think through strategic partnerships on both the supplier side and the facility side will increase and the facility portfolio will benefit from it," he concludes.
