Winner: Yorkshire Ambulance Service Interim FM Team, Sewell Facilities Management

Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust (YAS) is the region’s provider of emergency, urgent care and non-emergency patient transport services. The Trust covers 105 buildings across nearly 6,000 sq m across Yorkshire, from rural moors and dales to built-up urban areas.

Previously using an in-house core FM service with specialist maintenance outsourced to sub-contractors, YAS appointed Sewell Facilities Management to work across its estate in April 2019 with the primary goal to rectify quality and efficiency issues that had surfaced under the previous operation.

The Trust’s estates team noted the change from being quizzed about maintenance issues on a regular basis to receiving positive feedback on a more proactive approach to planned tasks and a quick response to reactive tasks.

Tom Farrow, Sewell FM team leader, directed the five-strong engineering team, each with their individual specialisms, to build a strong partnership with the client, based on mutual trust, quality, honesty and integrity.

Reactive tasks were first noted to the Trust’s single point of contact within Sewell FM’s customer care team, offering a more personalised service.

The commercial function ensured that the client was being offered value for money, that the team honoured its service commitments while protecting profit.

Best practice

Sewell FM was given just two weeks to mobilise; it built the YAS team strategically to ensure that other clients were still served effectively. The small team are empowered and encouraged to make decisions; as a result there is little hierarchy and the decision-making process is quick and efficient.

Internal team communication was key for Sewell to provide an effective service: given geographical issues across a large area, Sewell conducted fortnightly team huddles and separate weekly one-on-one meetings to understand each team member’s workload and keep abreast of team wellbeing.

Sewell FM offered a tailored approach. Several additional services which were not included in the original scope of work were added after the team discovered fixable problems for clients, including a call-out service, grounds maintenance and other minor works projects.

In addition to client communication through on-site engineers, the leadership team also provided monthly status reports to the client estates team – ensuring that there was both a top-down and bottom-up approach to external stakeholder communications.

Results

  • Successfully mobilised within two weeks with a small team to service a client which represents close to £1,000,000 in business for Sewell FM
  • Planned preventative maintenance tasks each month were completed at a consistent 100% rate, up from 82%
  • Achieved a minimum monthly rate of 97.7% for reactive maintenance tasks

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