Repairs and Maintenance Case Study

Doubling turnover to take the lead in the facilities management market

Morrison Facilities Services Ltd is one of the UK’s largest providers of Social Housing repair and maintenance services. From its Birmingham Headquarters, Qusharat Hussain, Commercial Director, oversees I.T for two company divisions, Midlands and South, across multiple sites, with contracts worth over £100million p.a. The main contract is with Birmingham City Council (£60 million p.a.), which has some 56,000 properties in Birmingham.

Quantifiable Benefits
Many company directors these days say: “IT is critical to our business”. In Morrison’s case, it is not only critical in a practical sense of enabling the business to function effectively 365/24/7, it is also, according to Qusharat: “the single most important aspect of our business that has attracted new clients and enabled us to target double digit growth”.

Tenant satisfaction levels are now generally recorded as ‘high’ in surveys – and Birmingham CC has just extended its existing contract with Morrisons for additional two years on the basis of this performance.

Qusharat Hussain is in no doubt that the benefits of the system put together by Morrisons and British Computer Services company, ROCC Computers, has enabled Morrisons to take a lead in the facilities management market: “Time costs money and every aspect of our business has seen a reduction in the time involved. Administration (front and back office), paperwork and transaction costs have been reduced by this level of automation. Staff are able to carry out more creative business and methods development work because they have more time to do so. Birmingham City Council can demonstrate savings and improved levels of service and is meeting its targets for Best Value.”

“ROCC’s role was pivotal to the success of our system”, says Qusharat. “ROCC staff integrated the products we had selected to use as ‘best of breed’ with their call centre and scanning solutions on a modern platform which is more efficient and faster than the previous platform. We have a solution that is flexible, versatile, has room for further development and growth and is easy to use for the ordinary call centre person – they do not need to have advance IT skills. They can become conversant with and use the system very quickly, with minimal training. That’s good for us and important for our customers and tenants”.

IT – the Competitive Advantage
Qusharat continues: “It is significant that ROCC’s personnel are seen as an extension of our own teams. Their knowledge and support have helped us to secure other contracts. Our joint effort has undoubtedly enabled Morrisons to attract new business: a number of other local authorities are interested, including Derby Council and British Gas/Transco.

“ROCC has enabled us to achieve a standard of quality that will make us the market leader in outsourced facilities management. The investment made has already been covered by our increase in income; it’s all about economies of scale and we have the capacity to add considerably to our business within the existing IT framework. Our system enables us to catch the right information and get the job done right first time.”

How does it Work?
It all started in 2003, when Morrisons employed ROCC to implement a system to make further improvements to its already advanced IT systems. The companies had already worked together for several years via Serviceteam, a facilities management business purchased by Morrisons. The system allows multiple contracts to be run and the profitability of each individual contract to be analysed and monitored. These contracts include councils such as Birmingham & Tamworth.

For Birmingham City Council, Morrisons undertake the repair and maintenance work for 56,000 residential properties, including running the call centre used by tenants to report their requirements. Its IT systems utilising around 200 workstations, now manage every aspect of the call centre, from the logging and coding of the phone call, to the work request, organising inspections, job completion reporting, scanning work tickets, invoicing and customer satisfaction surveys.

When a tenant ‘phones in (any time or day of the year), the system validates the tenant, goes through the diagnosis of the job required, identifies what tradesmen may be needed or if an inspector needs to call to check. Appointments are made by the Opti-time software, allowing for AM/PM bookings, with times where possible. Urgent repairs are often made the same day, with non urgent within 20 days – these achievements alone far exceed the performance of many other facilities management providers. The aim is to get the job done right first time, avoiding wasted resources, personnel time and job follow up work and therefore minimising costs, as well as ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction.

Repair jobs are issued to operatives via a work ticket. The operative carries out the task, marks the start and finish time, materials used, further work suggested etc. They bring the work ticket back to HQ where it is electronically input into the ROCC system, validated and captured on the database. Manual intervention is only required when the system flags up an anomaly (perhaps 5% of entries). It is so efficient that just four to six people process some 4,000 tickets per week – a work rate that many other organisations might require double the staff to process manually.

Some 1800 calls a day are taken by the Birmingham call centre, of which around 1000 are new repair requests. “What is most noticeable is the speed of our response time”, says Qusharat. “The automated system enables us to get to the details of a job quickly, accurately and comprehensively, so we can provide the right skills and materials to ensure a fix first time in the majority of cases.”

The data is archived so that the Council can audit when needed. Simply typing in the job number will bring up the full history of the job and its costs. “Being electronically archived has meant that the ‘back office’ element of our workload and the accessibility of data for the client, has been dramatically improved. In practical terms, we store far less paper and we can find information quite literally at the touch of a button. It’s safe, reliable, fast and efficient for our Clients – and even more rewarding in some ways, it means that their tenants receive a much better service. If they have queries on past jobs or want to check on existing ones, the answers are readily available. All this is reflected in the Council’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which measure our performance and reflect continual improvement since the introduction of the system”, says Qusharat.

Once the data about each job is captured into the system, the costs are automatically attributed using a comprehensive coding method and subsequently an invoice is raised. These are batched into groups for forwarding to the client at regular intervals – again interfaced via a fully automated link.

Commitment to the Future
According to Qusharat: “The initial task of bringing in three new integrated systems within a very demanding timescale of 12 weeks, was carried out calmly and efficiently, without causing any major upsets so that our old system could keep going until change-over. This took place ‘over-night’ and with no ‘hiccups’ – remarkable. ROCC staff understand our business and our priorities. They know their products well – we have worked together to maximise the integration of our chosen software and their ongoing support service is excellent.”

Qusharat concludes: “We are committed to introducing ROCC’s intranet based product, Uniclass Enterprise – back office, following the success of the move to the Front Office product. ROCC will continue to work with us to look to new technologies such as remote working via hand held units and alternative scanning technologies to minimise user input. We have confidence that the combination of quality of service and product range provided by ROCC will continue to enable us to meet the needs of our business and those of our customers and to meet our future growth targets.”