Thank you.
I'll start by giving an overview of BGIS, as we're now known. Brookfield Global Integrated Solutions was our previous name.
Founded in 1992, BGIS Global Integrated Solutions provides a full range of consulting, management, and delivery services for occupiers of real estate to improve their business performance. Globally, we manage 320 million square feet across 30,000-plus locations.
Our goal is to deliver innovative business solutions for our clients, continually creating stakeholder value and supporting them in achieving their business objectives. We also strive to be a role model for sustainable operating practices and portfolio strategies. BGIS’s Canadian operations have become the largest provider of integrated real estate services in our country with more than 4,500 employees delivering services across Canada. Our scale and reach across Canada ensures our clients an unparalleled level of support across their portfolios.
In a business world of unprecedented change and competitive pressures, BGIS is committed to pursuing new and better ways of delivering services for clients to enable them to drive their businesses forward. We pride ourselves on being a leader in our industry when it comes to corporate social responsibility and giving back to the communities in which we operate.
Our annual CSR report summarizes our sustainable practices and achievements while highlighting the strategies and goals we’ve created for our company moving forward. As BGIS now celebrates 25 years having started here in Canada as a Canadian organization providing facility management services across the real estate industry, promoting awareness of sustainable business practices remains a key priority, and we remain a key driver in this sense in our industry.
We have a number of objectives related to sustainability, including our 20/20/20 goal of reducing energy, waste, and water, and we drive this across our business environment, across our industry. We have demonstrated our leadership through our actions in diverting our waste and reducing our water consumption, as well as obviously reducing our energy intensity across our facilities and supporting our clients in reducing theirs.
For two years running, Corporate Knights magazine has recognized BGIS as one of the future 40 responsible corporate leaders in Canada in this regard, and we're ranked first out of four in the real estate management development category as defined under the global industry classification standard.
In 2015 we announced the Building Energy Innovators Council, which is a small, not-for-profit organization established to support the clean tech industry and the small to medium-sized enterprises in that industry to bring their new services and solutions to the market and leverage our portfolio globally as well as across Canada to enable them to achieve that goal.
We've raised over $400,000 annually for 34 charities and continue to work to build better communities across our nation.
Concerning PSPC's RP1 and RP2, our organization is a very large service provider to the federal government and in particular, PSPC's real property division. Our contracts in this regard consist of the delivery of diverse real property services for crown-owned and leased government assets. The scope of work includes property management, project delivery, and lease administration services for numerous Government of Canada custodians. Services delivered under these contracts include items such as operations and maintenance, repair for mechanical and electrical systems, building cleaning, and the delivery of construction projects. Collectively under the real property agreements, BGIS is responsible for managing approximately 1,900 locations across five million square metres of space.
The RP1 contracts represent six separate regional agreements including Pacific, Western, Ontario, Quebec, Atlantic, and the national capital region. These RP1 contracts commenced in April 2015, and run for a seven-year term initially and then six years of options.
Concerning RP2, this particular contract is a subset in the national capital region. It started in May 2013 and runs through to 2025 with options.
In providing these services delivered through the real property agreements, BGIS subcontracts in excess of 80% of the available spend it manages on behalf of the government. As such, BGIS understands the importance of maintaining access to a large and diverse list of vendors, including small and medium-sized enterprises. Subcontractor support is critical in the success of our delivery of these services.
Our procurement approach to real property contracts transfers total service delivery responsibility to BGIS for the services covered within the statement of work. With some exceptions, BGIS is principal contractor in the delivery of services and utilizes its own procurement policies and procedures and contract documentation when subcontracting these services, with the requirement that BGIS's subcontract conditions are compatible with those in the real property contracts and not less favourable to Canada.
BGIS also works with PSPC to pursue avenues for leveraging and implementing federal procurement programs such as the build in Canada innovation program, BCIP, with the real property contracts. We create industry awareness of these programs through our industry contacts and ultimately through all of our members of the Building Energy Innovators Council, which engages small and medium-sized enterprises, as stated earlier, in the clean tech sector.
BGIS consistently applies procurement policies and contracting processes that have been designed to ensure best value to Canada. In all of our procurements, BGIS aligns the contractual requirements of our RP1 and RP2 contracts and is also considerate of additional government policies, guidelines, and strategies including such things as the security requirements, which recently have actually become more onerous for this sector.
With regard to supplier engagement, BGIS is responsible for applying procurement and contracting processes that ensure value to Canada and represent cost efficiency, quality of services, and appropriate risk mitigation. Under these contracts, we are responsible for ensuring that procurement activities are conducted in an open, fair, transparent, and accessible manner and provide ongoing opportunities for participation throughout the industry.
BGIS makes every effort to ensure that procurement activities are inclusive of all vendors. Our objective is to provide and maintain a diverse supply chain that is reflective of our communities, employees, client base, and values. We recognize that small and medium-sized enterprises are a core component of our supply chain.
While no consistent governmental or industry certification standard exists to allow for consolidated tracking and reporting of this group, BGIS analyzes its own data sources to identify our subcontracting volume in this sector. Based on The Conference Board of Canada's guidelines regarding small and medium-sized enterprises, we estimate that over 90% of our supplier base utilized in supporting these real property contracts is in fact made up of small and medium-sized enterprises totalling approximately 75% of the annual recurring spend.
BGIS does not establish targets for SME utilization due to competitive procurement activity requirements of openness, fairness, and transparency. However, our goal is indeed to provide accessibility for all opportunities and the associated information to this diverse supply chain.
In order to accomplish this objective, we're actively engaged in a number of industry associations: Aboriginal and Minority Supplier Council, women-owned business enterprises, Canadian Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Federation of Independent Business, Office of Small and Medium Enterprises, Canadian Construction Association, Association de la construction du Québec, Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, Association of Consulting Engineering Companies, and Bureau canadien de certification intégrité. Our vice-president of operations actually sits on the board of this organization.
We have a number of engagement strategies also to ensure that we're staying engaged with local associations and their membership. These outreach activities include meetings, presentations, social media, and other outreach activities.
BGIS makes every effort to work with industry, to respond to industry concerns, adjusting our processes as necessary in order to facilitate continued access and opportunity for all vendors, a recent example being adjustments to procurement processes for construction projects of less than $1 million. I've provided the link in the handout.
BGIS provides communication of opportunities through various social media platforms along with communication channels through industry associations. We deliver accessibility of opportunities by leveraging an electronic bidding tool, providing enhanced access, promoting efficiency, and utilizing an open, fair, transparent, and accessible platform available to all enterprises.
Thank you.