A leading UK insurance company, whose estate comprised of ten premises, including corporate headquarters, a Data Centre and document storage ’warehouses’, required a Critical Asset Management process to be applied to the buildings, some of which were being maintained by resident engineering teams, while others were subject to periodic maintenance visits from external service contractors.
Due to their predominantly rural location, many of the buildings suffered from power failure. The Data Centre was critical to their core Business and operated on a 24 x 7 basis. The site was permanently manned by site engineers who were able to respond quickly during a crisis.
Failure of the Data Centre would have major Business and business reputation implications to the client, rendering them unable to deal with confidential client data, service existing customer policies or process new customer business.
A series of risk assessment were carried out following visits to each facility and their respective operational dependency was identified and modeled. Although not part of the Critical Asset Management review, operational capacity risks were identified and reported to the client for consideration and action. As a consequence significant infrastructure improvements were carried out to enhance critical system capacity and resilience.
Following the review of each facility, business critical systems and support systems were listed and a maintenance schedule for both critical and support systems was supplied. Maintenance services, previously provided by 3 separate contractors, were retendered and awarded to a single contractor, thereby creating a single point of accountability, cost consolidation and eliminating `grey areas` of responsibility.
A schedule of rates and management fee was agreed with the contractor for the maintenance works required to both critical and non-critical assets. The end result was an uplift in the maintenance services provided, thereby reducing operational risk of each facility; improved accountability and a 25 per cent saving (£250,000) on previous maintenance service contract arrangements.
The risk models and reports produced for the client allowed all of the parties involved in managing their premises to better understand the dependency of the Business upon the installed engineering systems; identifying system configuration and limitations and where operational risks may arise. The FM team was able to use this positive mechanism for communicating and reporting risk status to all management levels.
The Riskenomics modeling system was retained and used by the contract managers and auditors, monitoring the facilities management service, reviewing work sheets when required and validating contractor invoices. The service contractor remains focused on business critical assets as opposed to attending to maintenance schedules that may not improve business efficiency or continuity.
The client has benefited from greater control of all facilities, improved and pro-active maintenance of critical assets, together with positive management of operational risk giving increased operational confidence to the business.
