Corporate Campus Logistics Services: A New Approach

Every business day, corporate environments across the country function like small cities. This includes managing Facility and Logistics Management: A specialized service that ensures the efficient flow of materials and people at large multi-building office campuses serving thousands of employees. It’s an effort that spans a wide range—coordinating the receipt and distribution of supplies, equipment and packages; safely transporting thousands of employees, suppliers and contractors to locations within the campus; and tracking and warehousing countless materials to support daily planned and unplanned workplace needs.

Because many enterprises do not have a centralized process, including the staff, expertise and technology to manage these diverse campus-logistics activities, they often tap large commercial real estate companies to take on the complex challenge. The core business of a commercial real estate company, however, is managing physical real estate—overseeing business services is a secondary focus. Consequently, for many years real estate companies have typically sub-contracted facilities management and campus logistics services to a variety of different vendors.

This has led to the challenge of coordinating many vendors, each with distinct services tied to separate contracts as well as different methodologies, performance metrics and reporting systems. The various suppliers are responsible for providing a wide range of amenities—from shipping and receiving dock services to courier management, warehouse and inventory management, food service deliveries, waste disposal and employee shuttle services. For the real estate companies and their clients, however, this approach is changing. Today, real estate companies have begun leveraging the benefits of working with one vendor as a partner who can provide comprehensive campus logistics services bundled under one contract, with one set of performance metrics and one efficient reporting system. The cost savings and efficiency gains associated with this new approach can be significant.

As one real estate management executive interviewed for this white paper explains, “In the past, it was common to see at least three individuals from three different service providers walking the campus hallways. One might deliver postal mail, the other accountable mail and/or freight, while a third—a key operator with a toolkit—might service print/copy devices. Now these services can be delivered by one trained person from one vendor.”