Zero-Based Scoping means every recurring task in a facility contract has to earn its place from zero before anyone prices it. The result is a Scope Baseline: each task classified as value-added, required, preferential, or waste, with annual hours and cost on each. For a defense or aerospace site heading into a rebid, that one step changes the question from “what will the next vendor charge?” to “what should we be buying?”
Why rebids need Zero-Based Scoping
Most facility rebids start from the incumbent’s scope. The sourcing team copies the task list, adds the new square footage, and asks bidders to price it. As a result, every habit in the old contract carries forward: the nightly service nobody asked for, the inspection two vendors both perform, the cleaning schedule set for a building that has since half-emptied. Bidders then compete on rate, and the cheapest bid wins a scope nobody tested.
You have probably sat through that cycle. The price drops a few points, the scope stays the same, and two years later the budget looks just like it did before. In short, the problem was never the rate.
Four questions behind Zero-Based Scoping
Each task in the scope answers one of four questions. The answer decides its bucket, and the bucket decides what happens to it in the rebid.
What does the mission need?
If the task keeps a production floor, a lab, or a cleared space working, it is value-added. For example, FOD sweeps on a shop floor or preventive maintenance on the air handler that holds a clean room in tolerance. That work is protected cost, and you fund it first.
What rule requires it?
Some work adds nothing to the floor, but a regulation, a code, or the security office demands it anyway. Escort time, badge checks, and code-driven inspections fall here. You cannot remove that work, so the goal is to make it cheap and reliable. A cleared crew, for instance, removes most of the escort hours.
Who prefers it?
Then comes the work someone likes but the mission does not need, such as nightly glass cleaning in a lobby nobody uses after six. It is not wrong to keep it. However, it should be a decision with a price on it, not a habit carried forward from the last contract.
Can nobody answer?
Finally, a task that fails all three questions is waste. Cleaning empty space at an occupied frequency, two vendors inspecting the same area, and rework after a job done wrong the first time all land here. Waste is the first cost a rebid should remove.
What Zero-Based Scoping does to a rebid
Once every task has a bucket and a cost, the rebid specification writes itself. Bidders price the protected scope as written. They propose on the preferential scope, so you see what each option costs. Moreover, they commit to removing the waste, with the dollar figure already on the table.
The baseline also tells you whether consolidation pays. When three vendors share a site, classify their combined scope. The overlaps, the duplicate inspections, and the escort hours they each require show up as recoverable cost. That number, not a sales claim, is what justifies moving to one team. The method draws on the same value-stream thinking the Lean Enterprise Institute describes for manufacturing, applied to a facility contract.
IH Services builds every site plan this way. The full method, with the four buckets and the Scope Value Index, is on the Scope Baseline page. To see what it does to a budget, read what a 2027 facility budget should include.
Zero-Based Scoping questions
What is Zero-Based Scoping, and what is a Scope Baseline?
Zero-Based Scoping is the method; the Scope Baseline is the result. Instead of carrying last year’s facility scope forward and negotiating the price, every recurring task has to earn its place from zero. It does that by answering one question: what the mission needs, what a rule requires, or who prefers it. The Scope Baseline records the answer for every task, in four buckets: value-added, required non-value-added, preferential, and waste. It attaches annual hours and cost to each one at the site’s own rates. As a result, you get three numbers: protected cost, recoverable cost, and a Scope Value Index (the share of cost in value-added work). IH Services builds a Scope Baseline at no cost, under NDA, from the documents you authorize.
What does consolidating facility vendors save?
Less than a rate sheet suggests on price, and more than it shows on everything else. Consolidation saves the hours your own team spends coordinating, escorting, and reconciling invoices across several vendors. It removes duplicate mobilizations and overlapping scopes. When the provider self-performs, it also removes the margin a broker adds on subcontracted labor. Zero-Based Scoping is how you see those savings before you sign: classify the combined scope of every vendor on site, and the overlaps and waste show up as recoverable cost with a dollar figure on them. IH Services targets a 10 to 15 percent first-year reduction against the client’s own baseline and has met 100 percent of client-defined reduction targets to date.
How long does a Scope Baseline take?
It depends on how clean the documents are and how many vendors share the site. The work starts with the current scope of work, task frequencies, staffing plan, square footage by use, and twelve months of invoices. Once those arrive, the classification and costing run on the buyer’s own data, so the result is a measured baseline rather than an estimate.
Rebidding in the next twelve months? Send the current scope, the vendor list, and twelve months of invoices under NDA, and IH Services returns a Scope Baseline you keep whatever you decide. Request your Scope Baseline.