Being One of Several Vendors on the Same Building

Why this matters

On an institutional site you are almost never the only contractor. A hospital, a district, a plant or a campus splits its outside work across several shops and keeps some of it in house, and the split is written down somewhere you were probably never shown. The hours that quietly destroy the margin on that account are not the hours you spend on your own assets. They are the hours you spend on the ones nobody assigned, arriving on a ticket that was routed to you because a dispatcher matched a word in the description to your trade. You do the work because a building is occupied and somebody has to. Then you cannot bill it, because it is not on your asset list and there is no purchase order line it fits.

The skill here is not defending your turf. It is knowing exactly where your scope stops, keeping it stopped on purpose, and making the unassigned gap visible to the person who can fund it.

What the split is actually made of

Two documents define your boundary, and only one of them is in your contract.

The asset list is the inventory of equipment your agreement covers, usually by tag number, sometimes by location. This is the part you signed. It is also the part that goes stale, because equipment gets replaced, renumbered and moved and nobody reissues the exhibit.

The routing rule is how the facility's computerized maintenance management system, its CMMS, decides which vendor gets a ticket. That rule lives in their software, not your contract, and it is what actually determines what shows up on your phone. Routing by asset tag sends you only your equipment. Routing by trade keyword, or by whoever the after-hours dispatcher thinks of first, sends you anything with a matching word in the description.

When the routing rule is looser than the asset list, the difference lands on you as unbilled hours. That is the whole mechanism, and it runs the other way too: where routing is strictly by asset tag, tickets on unassigned equipment stall in an unassigned queue and turn into a deferred-maintenance complaint rather than a margin leak. Both are problems. They are not the same problem and they have different fixes, so find out which one you have before you build a response to the other.

Four things worth keeping off your scope, deliberately

Shops assume a wider scope is a better contract. On a shared building it is often the reverse, because a scope you cannot control the conditions of is a scope you absorb.

Anything on the fire protection system. Not because it is hard, but because touching a control valve on a water-based system creates an impairment, and an impairment has a procedure, an impairment coordinator and usually a fire watch attached to it under NFPA 25's impairment chapter. If that system is not explicitly yours, keep it explicitly not yours, and say so in writing the first time a ticket routes to you for a leaking head.

The controls front end. Programming, graphics, schedules and setpoint changes on a building automation system are a different competency and a different liability. A shop that accepts "adjust the schedule" tickets inherits every comfort complaint on the building.

Roof penetrations. Most institutions carry a roof warranty that names one approved roofing contractor, and a curb flashing cut by anyone else voids it. Take the mechanical work on the unit, decline the hole.

Anything the in-house crew already does. If facilities staff change filters and belts, do not take filters and belts. You will be slower, you will be more expensive, and you will have taken work off people whose goodwill controls your access to the mechanical room.

The exclusions worth writing down are not the ones you cannot do. They are the ones where the conditions of the work are set by somebody else.

The gap nobody owns

The interesting failures are not on your equipment or theirs. They are on the interface: the linkage between a controls-side actuator and a mechanical-side damper, the disconnect between a panel the electrical vendor owns and a motor you own, the drain line that starts at your coil and ends in a trap the plumbing vendor maintains.

Nobody assigned the interface because everybody assumed it fell inside the neighbouring scope. A ticket on it routes to whoever answers, and the shop that answers pays for the diagnosis that establishes whose side it is on. That diagnosis is real, skilled, billable work. It is also the work most likely to be refused at invoice, because the purchase order names your asset and the finding names theirs.

The in-house crew is one of the vendors

Shops read the facilities staff as customer. On a shared building they are better read as the vendor with the lowest price and the best access, and their scope moves with their staffing.

When the department is fully staffed, work migrates in house and your ticket count falls without anyone telling you why. When they lose two positions to a hiring freeze, the same work migrates back out, arrives as a surge, and arrives with no warning because the freeze was a budget decision made in a meeting you were not in. Neither movement is a comment on your performance, and reading it as one leads shops to discount into a trough that was never about price.

The practical consequence is that your boundary with the in-house crew is a staffing level, not a contract clause, and staffing levels are public information at most public institutions. It also means the crew lead controls something the facilities director does not: which door is unlocked at 07:30, whether anyone walks you to the mechanical room, and whether the pump you need to isolate has a current tag on its disconnect. Treat that relationship as operational rather than social. Ask what they want to keep, say plainly what you will not take from them, and hand back anything you find that falls in their lane rather than fixing it silently and mentioning it later.

Worked example: the damper nobody owned

A campus site, one year of history. Your agreement covers 14 of the 22 rooftop units, mechanical only. A controls contractor owns the actuators and the front end. The in-house crew owns filters, belts and the daily walk. Routing is by trade keyword, so any ticket containing "no cooling" comes to you.

A no-cooling call on unit 9 in June. Getting to the curb means a roof, and the fall-protection trigger is 4 feet from an unprotected edge in general industry under 29 CFR 1910.28(b)(1) and 6 feet on construction work under 29 CFR 1926.501(b)(1), so the route from the hatch to the unit is planned around the edge distance before anyone carries a gauge set up the ladder. Supply air is warm, the compressor is running, and the economizer damper is sitting most of the way open on a 91 F day.

The damper is mechanical. The actuator that positions it is controls. Establishing which one is stuck means watching the damper move against a commanded position, and commanding an outside-air damper is not a free action: driving one to full outside air pulls unconditioned air across a wet coil, which on a cold day freezes the coil and on a humid day floods the drain pan, so the command is made only with the compressors locked off at the unit disconnect, de-energized and verified dead by a qualified person under 29 CFR 1910.333(b)(2) using the live-dead-live sequence in NFPA 70E-2021, 120.5, and it is never made on a unit serving a space that cannot take the swing. The actuator strokes. The linkage does not follow. Bent linkage, mechanical, yours.

That is 3.5 hours to establish a 40-minute repair. You bill it, because it landed on your side.

Now the year. Across 41 tickets on that site, 6 landed in the boundary zone, about 15% of the tickets. Those 6 consumed 31 of 148 on-site hours, about 21% of the hours, averaging 5.2 hours each against 3.3 hours for the other 35 tickets, roughly 1.5 times the length. Of those 31 hours you billed 12 and absorbed 19, because on 4 of the 6 the finding pointed at somebody else's asset. Nineteen unbilled hours is about 13% of your total on-site hours for the year, on an account you would have described as profitable.

The number that matters is not the 19. It is the 4. Four times in a year, a skilled diagnosis established a fact the facility needed and could not otherwise get, and it was written off as a courtesy because there was nowhere to put it.

What to do with the gap instead of eating it

Turn the boundary diagnosis into a line item before you need it, not after. Three moves, in this order.

Get a diagnostic authorization written into the agreement. A standing allowance of a stated number of labor hours per ticket for establishing responsibility on shared or unassigned equipment, billable regardless of which vendor the finding lands on. One to two hours per ticket is a defensible starting point on rooftop and pumped-water systems, and you tune it to the size of the plant. This is the single change that converts the leak into revenue, and it is easy to agree because the facility is already paying for it in deferred faults.

Ask for a written unassigned list, not a wider scope. Walk the plant once, list the equipment that appears on no vendor's exhibit, and hand it over. You are not bidding it. You are handing the facilities director a document they can take to their own budget cycle, which is a favour with a long memory.

Ask the CMMS administrator to route by asset tag. This is a software setting, it costs the institution nothing, and it stops the mis-routed tickets at the source. If they will not, ask instead that tickets on unassigned assets be flagged rather than auto-assigned.

How to verify you got this right

Pull twelve months of tickets for one shared site and sort them into three piles: on your asset list, clearly somebody else's, and unassigned. Then total the hours in each pile and the hours you actually billed in each.

If the unassigned pile is under about 5% of your on-site hours, the boundary is working and this is not your problem to solve. Between 5% and 15%, the diagnostic authorization above will cover it. Above 15%, the routing rule is broken, not the contract, and no pricing change will fix a dispatch setting.

Second check, and it catches the case the hours miss: count how many boundary findings you handed to the facility in writing versus how many you handled verbally on the roof. If the written count is zero, you have been doing the institution a service it has no record of, which means it will not appear anywhere in the re-bid file either.

References

• 29 CFR 1910.28(b)(1) and 29 CFR 1926.501(b)(1), fall protection triggers for general industry and construction work
• 29 CFR 1910.333(b)(2), de-energizing and verifying electric utilization equipment before work; NFPA 70E-2021, 120.5, the live-dead-live proving sequence
• NFPA 25, impairment procedures for water-based fire protection systems
• See related: What Changes When the Customer Has a Facilities Department, The Facilities Director and What They Are Actually Judged On, How to Run a First Walkthrough on an Institutional Site