Norwich & Peterborough Building Soc.

The Norwich and Peterborough Building Society (NPBS) is the fourteenth largest in the UK and is committed to maintaining its mutual status. It employs some 900 people in over fifty branches, which are primarily in eastern England. The Facility Services department is located in the Lynch Wood head office near Peterborough. "Our role is maintaining all the non-core services for the staff, who we see as our ‘direct customers’. We do the building maintenance, the utilities, catering and cleaning, the car fleets… all sorts of things, for the head office and all the branches – maybe 70 buildings in total, so it's a relatively small operation compared with some Planon users." The speaker is Kevin Orme, who is Head of Facilities for NPBS.

Better management control
NPBS started using Planon relatively recently. "The first modules were the Helpdesk and the Work Orders. We also use it for Budget Management, and Alarms and Personnel Management. The users are two surveyors, four helpdesk staff and one manager. It's already proving worthwhile and meeting our expectations," explains Kevin Orme. "We previously had a number of home-made databases regurgitating the same information. But, after carefully scoping the system first, we have something that has really captured everything we did, and which gives us better management control.

Instilling discipline
"The main effect that the introduction of Planon has had on the way we work is that it has forced us to be much more disciplined. Information has to be kept up to date, for example, all the contractors for the work that is outsourced (we don't have people in-house for that) and the back office for the work orders that can be e-mailed out. Increased efficiency was one of the driving forces for us, and of course the enhanced level of service that comes with that. And we have to keep our level of knowledge up too: there was the initial training and the implementation, but your own experience and expertise increase with use of the system, so you also benefit from more training later on."

Finding different angles
"Any time now – sometime in March – we're going to start using Planon Self-Service, the Planon intranet solution. That will allow anybody at the branch offices to submit a request, a kind of customer self-service. Going live in much the same time frame is the visitor registration, which will let users register visitors to the head office so that the reception desk can sort out visitors' badges. So things are moving forward for the future. We're finding different angles."

Listening to customer needs
One important aspect of the work carried out by the NPBS that it wants to record in Planon is the building condition surveys. "The idea is to use hand-held units during the site surveys and get the information out of them and into Planon, as input for long-term maintenance planning and refurbishment for example, and eventually maybe for fire risk assessments as well. But at the moment, the only handhelds for condition surveys are ruggedised hand-held PCs, whereas we were thinking of something more like an iPAQ," he explains. And then adds confidently, "But Planon listen to their customers and the modules will get customised as needed."

Working smarter rather than harder
The increasing complexity of the FM department's role had emphasised the need for change: capacity was stretched. "We had to be careful about scoping it correctly at the beginning, but our work is more efficient now – if you like, you could say we now have an FMIS that lets us work smarter rather than harder."