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The stately lobby of the Le Royal Meridien, Mumbai.

Outsourcing of vital hotel engineering functions could work well, given the operational expertise the facility management company brings with it, says Sapna Kulshrestha.

Hospitality businesses are increasingly outsourcing the whole, or part of, hotel engineering, to external service providers.

However, the debate still rages about the pros and cons of outsourcing vital engineering and infrastructure services; the distinction is important, as both in-house and outsourced facility management have value and cost implications that are unique to themselves.

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Masih Siddiqui, chief engineer Le Royal Meridien, Mumbai, says: “We have outsourced HVAC to Blue Star, and sewage treatment plant (STP) to a related company, as they were the specialists who had also done the project.”

Environmental aspirations, reinforced by increasingly stringent regulations, are driving technological advancements in areas such as heating/cooling, water and power systems, fire and security systems, renewable energy sources, and telecommunications, thereby requiring specialised professionals.

Proactive maintenance gives advantages like long-term savings from fewer breakdowns, fewer unplanned repairs, as well as lower energy costs because of improved efficiency of equipment. The downside is that preventive or proactive maintenance of specialised installation involves major expenses and higher maintenance costs for a hotel.

Critics argue that outsourcing of engineering services is short-sighted. As outsourced services become noncritical for the organisation they tend to get neglected by the management, which leads to reduced ownership of processes and installations, and may also lessen a hotel’s flexibility to respond to unique tasks and surges in workloads.
 

Further, the hotel management is likely to lose control over the technical staff’s quality, which is decided by the outsourced provider. NC Malhotra, assistant vice president, projects and engineering services, The Lemon Tree Hotel Company, says: “This solution may look quite attractive in the beginning, but the contracting agency will always try to push low-cost staff to the hotel and that too, without adequate experience.”

Moreover, as the skills required of in-house staff are organisation-specific, it may require steep learning curves needing management focus.

This is one of the reasons many hotels in India continue to have in-house facility management which, though a costly option, gives the management qualitative and quantitative control of its facilities, or else they employ an integrated team where the technician staff is from a facility management company, while the supervisors and engineers are on the hotel payroll.

However, due to the restricted number of supervisory staff, it leads to the limited engineering strength handling too many activities at one time, impacting the overall quality of service.