Outsourcing of Facility Management Activities and Procurement Design

We introduce a multi-attribute combinatorial auction-based mechanism, called contract clause mechanism (CCM), as a mean to innovate procurement design related to outsourcing of facility management activities. The CCM allows a procurer and sellers to dynamically and simultaneously bargain the characteristics of distinct procurement contracts. The procurer does not directly call for goods and/or services; in fact, firstly he involves sellers in defining a collection of contract clauses related to different features of the supply of goods/services; secondly he requests bids on such clauses. The procurer also assigns scores to clauses to signal their relevance to the sellers. Submitted offers concern bundles of sets of clauses and define detailed procurement contracts. CCM allows procurers to mitigate the relevant problem concerning the lack of competences on the non-core activities, since CCM can partially extract from sellers their private knowledge as well as information on the supply cost.