The core responsibilities of facilities managers will remain, but the profession is shifting as organizations reevaluate office footprints, on-site presence declines, and financial oversight continues to sharpen, explained Kurt Kuntzmann, Senior Indirect Purchasing & Facilities Manager for Toll Brothers, Inc., at IFMA’s 2025 World Workplace conference.
However, these changes don’t have to be a threat—they can be a significant opportunity to elevate facilities management as a profession and your own visibility within your organization. One way to harness that opportunity is to take control of indirect spend management, Kuntzmann said.
Indirect spending—all of the spending your organization does that isn’t directly tied to the product it sells—is a black hole for many companies. Vendor contracts continue for years without anyone reviewing them. Services are provided by multiple vendors who overlap. Legacy contracts may even include fees your organization shouldn’t be paying. Because facilities managers have firsthand knowledge of daily operations and vendor needs, they’re in a prime position to cut costs, reduce redundancies, and negotiate better rates, Kuntzmann said.
“[Indirect spend is] often managed by teams who are excellent at crafting contracts and RFPs, but who don’t live in the day-to-day operations, in the trenches like we do,” said Kuntzmann. “They don’t see when vendors consistently underperform, when services overlap, or when costs are inflated by legacy agreements—but we do.” Facilities managers are arguably in the best position to bring discipline and leadership to this area, Kuntzmann said. “The facilities manager of the future isn’t reactive to indirect spend, they’re proactive,” he said. “They’re not just maintainers, they’re cost savers.”
6 Steps to Integrate Indirect Spend Management into Facilities Management
Kuntzmann presented a roadmap for integrating FM and indirect spend management that’s scalable for any organization. It involves six steps:
1. Gain Visibility
“You cannot manage what you cannot see,” Kuntzmann explained. “Start with an audit. Go into your accounting and pull receipts. Pull contracts. Look at invoices. Look at reoccurring POs. Ask who owns this, what are we paying for and is it still needed, and are we getting value? You’ll be astonished at what some of your divisions are doing.”
A similar audit at Toll Brothers uncovered a surprising opportunity for savings—cancelling wireless plans tied to company-issued iPads, which the company no longer used. A little digging revealed that most of the iPads weren’t showing any usage. “It became clear that these plans were carried over month to month, and it was a legacy program that was just on cruise control,” Kuntzmann explained. “That simple cleanup exercise eliminated unnecessary spending, tightened up our telecom footprint—which IT was happy about—and gained visibility.”
2. Standardize Vendor Management
Do you know who all your vendors are? Which ones are getting the most usage from you? Build a vendor matrix that shows who’s doing what and what commodities and labor they provide to you, and identify redundancies. You may discover you’re using the same vendor in multiple regions, which presents an opportunity to consolidate multiple regional contracts into a national account with volume discounts.
3. Implement Strong Contract Management
“You’ve got to read the Ts and Cs,” Kuntzmann said. Every agreement needs to be intentional to protect the organization from overspending, ensure consistency, and give leadership “the confidence that every dollar is managed with purpose,” he explained. You should also build a practice of conducting semi-annual vendor reviews to see whether they’re delivering the value they promised and whether your agreements are still aligned with your current business model. Hold vendors accountable for doing what they said they would do at the price they promised.
4. Use Technology
“Use all the tools in the shop,” Kuntzmann urged. “Effective management of indirect spending doesn’t require a million-dollar platform.” You may already have such a platform, but you also might have Excel or customer dashboards offered by your vendors. Use them to the best of your ability so you can get the data you need to spot inefficiencies. “It’s not about the technology, it’s about how you use the technology,” Kuntzmann said. “Facilities managers who master this approach will move beyond operations and become indispensable strategic partners with the organizations they serve.”
5. Align with Leadership Priorities
Do you know your company’s mission statement, ethos, vision, or other leading documents? If you don’t, you should—because that’s how you need to align your conversations with leaders.
“Those statements aren’t created out of the air,” Kuntzmann said. “Those are the marching orders they have for you, and leadership wants you to take those words and run with them. You need to accept those words and then deliver results upwards with those words.”
This doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as using their phrasing to deliver your report to them. For example, if you work for a company that emphasizes sustainability, show how your work reduces waste, energy consumption, or supplier impact.
“When every result you deliver reinforces the company’s ethos and vision, you’ll be seen as demonstrating immense value,” Kuntzmann said. “Leadership will see you as essential because your wins speak their language.”
6. Measure and Communicate Value
The skill of storytelling could be your secret weapon. Kuntzmann described how he goes into meetings with images rather than spreadsheets to drive the narrative of how much indirect spending was saved, how his department saved it, and why it matters.
“We don’t have complex charts. We have a compelling narrative that’s easy to understand,” Kuntzmann said. “Leadership already knows this information. They want to hear your compelling story. They want to hear clarity and KPIs. They want to talk about cost avoidance. Did we stop a bad contract from being renewed? Any efficiency gains? Did turnaround time improve? Did we consolidate savings? Did vendors reduce overhead? We like to anchor every data point with an example.”
Facilities managers taking on indirect spending management have a shining opportunity to demonstrate increased value to their organizations, Kuntzmann added.
“Ensure leadership sees us no longer as overhead, but as an essential strategic partner contributing to our organization’s success, and harness the power of storytelling,” Kuntzmann said. “Go out there, practice, and tell your story to senior leaders.”
