Mar 2005
MONITORING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF FM IN THE CATERING INDUSTRY
Brent Miller, Managing Director of Miller’s Vanguard – an established foodservice FM provider - talks about the performance criteria in place for it’s customers Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Kwik Save and Somerfield to review the success of their facilities management programmes.
Truly effective catering FM is about giving customers an effective scheduled maintenance programme, which will in turn reduce the number of reactive maintenance calls incurred as a result. When equipment does breakdown 24hr equipment failure resolutions should be available to ensure that downtime is kept to an absolute minimum. The links between reactive and scheduled maintenance are very tight and the combined power of these components is the first step in giving the customer an FM programme, which highlights its own performance effectiveness.
Take the supermarket chains as an example – there are vast numbers of equipment within their customer restaurants and in-store bakeries. Good preventative maintenance at this volume requires a dedicated clean & service resource that only performs services. Simply steam cleaning equipment cannot constitute an effective service, Miller’s Vanguard take a different approach by exchanging a pre determined number of components for ones that have been cleansed in a caustic bath. This ensures the highest performance output from the equipment and less likelihood of a failure after it is returned to work.
Extensive research into this unique clean & service approach has revealed that on average there is 54% overall reduction in the number of reactive maintenance calls logged from a store in the six months after the service compared with the six months prior. This is a major performance measure for the customer as the saving of the reactive maintenance calls not incurred as a result of the service quickly becomes evident as the volume of reactive maintenance call out charges will begin to decline. A thorough clean and service is also measurable by the operator once he recommences work on the machine and in the comments departmental managers feed into their regional F.M. managers.
In the past, supermarkets would outsource its scheduled maintenance to one cleaning company and when, and if, the machine broke down another company would be called out to do the emergency repairs. As scheduled and reactive operations lend themselves to each other, this set-up is detrimental to the downtime incurred for the customer. Neither of these companies would be the original equipment manufacturer meaning that the ability to exchange parts during a service was never an option open to them, as they didn’t have access to the original manufacturing units.
We asked Brent how stores are able to measure the success of the Reactive Maintenance side of the operation, he went on to explain, how Miller’s breakdown engineers are measured on their first time fix rate – where the engineer leaves the store and the equipment is working again. From the customer’s perspective the most frustrating issue occurs when parts are required to fix the machine. This leaves them with idle equipment for duration of the ordering process. Being part of the Aga manufacturing group has allowed Miller’s Vanguard to build up a large floating stock of the heavy use equipment that regularly fails for customers that can be loaned out to the stores in replacement of equipment awaiting parts. This extra unique offering is satisfactory to the customer as Brent believes a successful F.M. programme for the customer should provide minimal disruption to production of their food products – the loan programme fulfils this requirement by ensuring downtime is reduced to an absolute minimum.
The key to offering a slick facilities management service to the foodservice sector is providing both reactive and preventative equipment maintenance on a local, regional and national level from one central logistics centre teamed with a strong manufacturing back-up.
About Miller’s Vanguard
Miller’s Vanguard provides specialist maintenance for bakery & catering equipment and is a business name of the AFE Group - the market leader in the domestic and commercial catering equipment industry.
For further information or to arrange an interview with Brent Miller, Miller’s Vanguard’s Managing Director, please contact:
Eve Rigby, Marcomms Manager
Tel: 0161 764 7374
Fax: 0161 761 5141
E-mail: eve.rigby@millersvanguard.co.uk