Facilities Management Services

Andron has the Golden Touch

Andron Facilities Management has worked closely with Warrington's Golden Square Shopping Centre and Bus Interchange since 2004, after being awarded the prestigious contract to fully service the premises on behalf of Lend Lease. In 2014, we will celebrate a decade of working with Golden Square after receiving a contract extension in 2007.

Background

We were selected as the lead contractor to deliver the facilities management contract for Golden Square just a few weeks before the newly-developed retail centre opened its doors. The centre covers one million square feet and houses more than 140 stores, 1,700 parking spaces and a bus interchange. Those behind the development had a vision to create an up to date Golden Square, fit for the new millennium. An extensive refurbishment and extension programme doubled the size of the centre and since its re-launch in June 2007, Golden Square has reclaimed its position as one of the largest and most contemporary town centre shopping destinations in the north west.

Challenge

Our challenge was to mobilise a comprehensive facilities management programme, to meet the deadline of opening day, with a focus to implement a fully functional, amalgamated management and operational team. The situation was further complicated because the development was still undergoing refurbishment close to launch day and we had just four days to perform a complete clean of the whole centre.

Solution

In order to provide a comprehensive service and a fully operational team, we took the following steps: We built a totally new management structure, comparable in scope to the new requirements of the expanded site. We added additional resources such as operation managers and duty managers to oversee the introduction of large operational cleaning and security teams, ensuring the smooth integration into an already established team.

Gaps in operation requirements were identified from the outset of the project. High calibre individuals were recruited as necessary to fulfil roles such as Handy Man and Night Shift Caretaker so that resources where readily available on site, in the event of unforeseen occurrences. New shift systems were also implemented, spreading resources without impacting on the service. This resulted in lower labour costs and higher productivity.

Due to the level of service that we anticipated for this site we chose to locate a dedicated Helpdesk Administrator on site. This service would normally be delivered from our regional office based in Warrington, but in order to deliver a concentrated service we opted to provide a dedicated resource to schedule and manage each task needed by Golden Square.

Mechanical and electrical as well as fabric planned preventative maintenance ranked highly on our agenda. We wanted to ensure that all aspects of the site were operating correctly, therefore avoiding any unscheduled breakdown and downtime. Planned maintenance was created for every item separately according to manufacturer's recommendation or legislation Andron's Operations Director, Paul Orru, said: "We believed it was imperative to deliver the right solutions from the very start as the tight deadlines meant there was no room for error. We decided to expand the mobilisation team to include additional resources like operations managers and mobile cleaning and security teams in order to ensure we met our targets."

To provide continuity, we ensured that key personnel remained the same throughout the bidding process to mobilisation and service delivery. Staff were also on site as the contract was rolled out to handle queries and deal quickly and competently with any issues that arose.

Paul added: "By creating a robust mobilisation team and putting in place a comprehensive transition programme, we were able to install all required services within four weeks."