"I don't think it will be long before you can commoditise support services. Services in FM are as near as you can get to commodities." This was the rather startling claim put forward by Phillip Russell, MD of Servus Facilities Management at a presentation of its Servus Clubsite B2B e-commerce service last Thursday.

Speaking to a meeting of The Bartlett's FM Exchange at University College London, Russell explained why Servus (financed by Nomura) were moving into e-commerce: "As companies begin to move out of property ownership Nomura is moving into the 'total property scenario'. Turner & Townsend (bought by Servus in 1998) has always done procurement we're simply applying e-commerce to it."

As presented, the Servus solution is simply an online catalogue of office commodities, built on the Marketsite product from Commerce One , licensed to BT in the UK. Behind your password to the system lies a set of business rules governing choice of suppliers, authorisation and spending levels.

Where Russell believes he has an edge over the competition, such as Chesterton's e-team, is that Servus already has significant procurement contracts. However, he acknowledges that unless his operation adds value it could go the way of other intermediaries, such as travel and estate agents, faced with online competition.

Asked why FM contractors would buy through the Servus site, Russell said they wouldn't have a choice: "If they haven't developed a solution themselves customers will want to know why. There will be a shake-out amongst FM suppliers and aggregators."

The FM Exchange audience was fairly sceptical, expressing doubts as to whether Servus could achieve critical mass and disputing the idea that FMs buy services on price.

Servus is currently conducting a three month trial with three internal Nomura companies: Nomura Bank, Thorn Rental and Inn Partnership. "The success factors are different for each," said Russell, "For example, Nomura Bank already has the economies of scale but has poor procurement processes - there are nine stages of approval to buy a mobile phone."

Although Servus talked about extending the concept to services, it is by no means clear how this would be done and at the moment Clubsite is not a fully-integrated supply chain solution.

Richard Byatt