We help organisations improve performance and value
We support the full change process (or any part of the process) to help organisations improve the performance and value for money of their corporate real estate and facilities services.
Property Portfolio and Workplace
We all operate in an increasingly complex and fast-changing environmen and it is important that the workplace meets the needs of the moment. The rise of remote working offers opportunity but also risk for most employers – we help businesses to navigate this. Whether you occupy a single floor or an extensive portfolio of properties, we can help you plan ahead to achieve improvements in business performance through more efficient (lower cost) and effective (higher productivity) use of the workplace.
Our focus is on helping clients to align their accommodation with their operational strategy. We begin by helping you to evaluate the relationship between your current property holdings and the needs of your organisation. We explore your options by developing rigorous business cases, and then go on to facilitate the change process.
Our team has significant experience both working in-house as head of estates and as independent consultants on major workplace and portfolio change programmes. We have no vested interest in whether you move, re-configure or refurbish buildings. This means that we provide high-quality advice to guide clients through these complex decisions.
Facilities Management
When facilities management is done well, businesses run more effectively and save money. That’s at the heart of what we do.
We begin by helping our clients to understand which areas require improvement through a detailed review of the current situation. We have considerable knowledge of the facilities management market and substantial benchmarking data which helps us develop improvement strategies. As independent consultants, the advice we give is always objective.
We will work collaboratively with your in-house team and and relevant suppliers to ensure effective long-term solutions are implemented. Where there has been systemic failure in the supply chain we can also offer commercial and dispute resolution services.
Our work ranges from simple jobs such as facilitating joint supplier client planning to significant projects requiring organisational transformation, such as making changes to company culture, resourcing, data usage and processes.
FM Procurement
We have procured over £400 million worth of facilities services including FM management, maintenance, cleaning, security, grounds maintenance and catering, as well as specialist PFI contracts. Our clients span the public and private sectors, in the UK and beyond.
Our independence means we can give impartial advice on the best procurement solution for our clients. In the past these have included a range of different models including managing agent, total facilities management, single service, bundled services and in-house service delivery
Our extensive understanding of the FM market means that we can help our clients tender to the organisations that best align with their businesses.
Our proven strategy to improve value:
Identifying organisational requirements
Ensuring that you are buying what you need
Assessing risk and allocating it to the most relevant party
Performing a detailed comparative analysis of pricing, using our benchmarking database.
Digital Transformation
We support the development of digital strategies for our clients’ properties and facilities, starting by defining the business case to justify investment. We support the procurement of systems to deliver these strategies and ensure clients have the right data to provide better services.
There are many opportunities for technology to significantly improve how property and facilities businesses operate. IoT and artificial intelligence technologies can not only help organisations manage their compliance and the demand for FM services, it can help them to understand how their properties are used, ensuring a safe and productive work environment.
By integrating data across systems, technology can provide the information for property and facilities to be an important, evidence based part of the business debate.
Increasingly, technologies can be retrofitted to existing buildings which means that the benefits employees experience in new buildings can be enjoyed across whole estates
At the moment, one-off solutions are rarely available to support all of an organisatio’s technology and information requirements. Therefore, choosing and integrating systems is an important component of any digital transformation. We help our clients avoid a piecemeal approach by seeing the bigger picture of how then can benefit from innovation.
Occupant Wellbeing
The environment that your staff work in and the services they receive can have a huge impact on their physical and mental wellbeing. Whether employees are in an office, working from home or in another location, employers have a responsibility as well as a productivity incentive to safeguard this.
As part of our services, we work closely across teams spanning Human Resources, Property and Facilities Management to ensure that people’s wellbeing is clearly understood and the needs of staff in the office or at home are met.
Solutions can be wide ranging depending on how occupant wellbeing needs to improve. These can range from improvements to lighting and ventilation, through to changing catering to ensure better nutrition and social interaction, to making sure that there is good infection control in the building, to ensuring that furniture meets the ergonomic needs of the individual.
Solutions for home workers need to ensure they still feel part of the organisation and that other intangible requirements are captured and met.
We help organisations develop their understanding of current wellbeing in the organisation through surveys, targeted interviews and evaluating organizational trends such as sickness. We then help identify options for improvement and enable the changes required, including planning the communication of the results. We also support the ongoing process of testing whether improvements are working; adapting and changing as required, to maintain a continuing process of improvement to occupant/staff wellbeing.
Asset Management
In Facilities Management, Mechanical and Electrical (M&E) and Building Fabric infrastructure are critical risk assets that are expensive to procure and maintain. Making sure asset management is properly undertaken is vital to ensuring that you have a legally compliant estate, and that unexpected maintenance and life cycle costs are minimised. Good asset management requires good data, systems, suppliers, and a clear understanding of your legal and contractual obligations as well as the internal customer needs. It has to consider the risks that the organisation faces and the criticality of different assets and how they impact on operations and other linked issues such as lease obligations.
As part of the asset management process it is important to understand whether the systems used to manage the services are able to give you the information needed such as the cost implications required by the finance team and information to make informed life cycle decisions (equipment replacement, energy consumption).
We recognise the importance, value and criticality for organisations to have accurate, well planned, asset information to be able to manage and maintain assets effectively throughout their life cycle.
We can review the whole asset management service from assessing business criticality of assets and systems, to the capturing of asset information and establishing required planned maintenance standards, through to development of life cycle planning and replacement. We also support the development of business cases to evaluate investment in systems and assets.
From a contractual perspective we also audit supply chains to ensure that maintenance and life cycle obligations are properly carried out and that they provide value for money.
Compliance
We can help ensure that you and your suppliers are compliant ranging from ensuring contract compliance through to legislative compliance across your assets and property portfolio.
Typical compliance areas that impact on property and facilities include Health and Safety, Data Security and Governance, Modern Slavery Act, minimum wage legislation, and statutory maintenance.
We help establish and check systems, processes and contracts to ensure that you are meeting your legal obligations. In particular we can:
- Audit suppliers to ensure they are complying with the contract in terms of performance, transparency and openness and ensure you are receiving all the information that they are contractually obliged to give.
- Review asset systems and asset types that need to be certified; this will produce a cross section of statutory and mandatory elements for review and identify gaps allocating responsibility to the supply chain.
- Ensure relevant facilities management systems and certification are in place and there is demonstrable compliance.
- Check that there are appropriate escalation processes in your organisation if there is compliance failure
- Check compliance training is demonstrably undertaken
Sustainability and Social Value
Sustainability issues such as climate change, water security and waste means that organisations need to have clear sustainability targets, reporting and demonstrable achievement. This is driven both legislatively and through stakeholder pressure from employees, customers, investors and local communities.
Property and FM is often at the forefront of sustainability programmes in relation to greenhouse gas emissions, water and energy, waste and re-cycling, travel plans, and through sourcing, checking that suppliers are compliant with environmental legislation and company environmental policies.
We can help develop the corporate social responsibility (CSR) objectives which are relevant to your organisation and help embed sustainability across your portfolio and FM services, ensuring compliance with legal requirements and bringing benefit to local communities. This includes ensuring processes, resources and people are in place to help reduce the environmental impacts of occupier operations and continual improvement of environmental management (including audit and review). We also work with suppliers to reduce the environmental impact of the resources they use and the services they provide as well as looking at ways to support local economies, encouraging diversity and giving employment opportunities to disadvantaged groups.
£400M
FM Services
1M sqm
Property Strategies
£1bn
FM Reviews
1997
Established
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