1

Asset Factory Putting you in control of your property assets

Executive summary

3

Asset Factory – the postman’s little helper…How an iPad and a Water Boiler helps postmen and women deliver your mail on time…

All too often FM organisations deliver rear view performance measurements that use operational data to mask true performance, are difficult to truly measure accurately, do not allow intervention or corrective action, nor help the customer.

In short – a bit unreliable for the second decade of the 21st Century. Especially where those services are of a mission critical nature in a unique and diverse building and asset estate.

A bold claim… but we’re confident that a few judges recognise this scenario.

Royal Mail did recognise this and asked CDS to help them overcome a few risks. Namely, grappling back ownership of their data and visualising real time information which helps them to manage their internal stakeholders and also more effectively manage the performance of their assets (see water boilers example later…) and their suppliers. This allows the company to keep mail flowing smoothly through their network for delivery to customers.

The unique and complex nature of the Royal Mail facilities and assets add an extra dimension to this submission as it is far removed from the orthodox corporate office examples where most innovation is developed. Indeed, that unique environment added to the physical and technical challenge.

To be fair, the whole implementation was an outstanding team effort involving the client, the FM supplier and CDS, with all parties recognising an upside.

This submission describes how this was achieved and how the ongoing benefits are being delivered.

4

Introduction

5

CDS and Royal Mail present this joint submission for the i-FM Technology Award 2017.

The submission covers the work to deploy mobile and real-time reporting into the Royal Mail Operations – not ground-breaking in itself, but the data being used is extensive and is used to deliver real actionable insight & outcomes in a way that no other solution does.

Some scale/context:

Royal Mail:• The UK’s sole designated universal service

provider for mail.

• Established in 1516 and celebrating 500 years of postal services in 2016.

• A FTSE100 company since October 2013.

• It delivers to 29 million UK addresses; 6 days a week.

• 139,000 employees /over 115,000 post boxes / 47,000 vehicles.

• Post bag (2015-16): Letters 15.5bn / Parcels 1.1bn

• Property Dimensions

– Property portfolio of c1,500 operational sites, plus office buildings.

– Sites from the Lerwick to Penzance.

CDS:• Formed in 1994.

• Part of The Baird Group since 2000.

• National agency, operating from 8 main UK locations.

• 220 staff .

• Turnover circa £30m.

• End-to-end communications services (Digital, Creative & Print, Defence and Automotive)

• Key Sectors:

– Property Asset Management.

– B2B financial services.

– UK Government.

– Security Services.

– Travel & Transportation.

For the last 10 years, CDS has been the development partner and systems administrator for e-PIMS. For over a decade the UK’s entire Central Civil estate and land assets have been managed using e-PIMS, a location-based asset management system based on an Ordnance Survey GIS core. In Oct 2016 ePIMS was awarded Property Management System of the Year in the Property Week Management All Stars Awards.

The Government Property Unit, a unit within The Cabinet Office, is the controller of e-PIMS. GPU is a central government department that determines and implements property asset management policy across the majority of public sector organisations. Through e-PIMS its priorities are to support the delivery of:

• The UK’s public sector £21.5bn annual property efficiency targets.

• £3bn saving in Central Government procurement.

• Ongoing improvement in the success rate of mission critical projects.

And to support services that identify cost saving opportunities in the estate by:

• creating an effective and efficient government estate.

• providing value for money for the taxpayer.

• disposing of surplus property in a way that maximises financial return.

• boosting growth and creating new homes.

Michael Stephens is the Asset Factory product owner and Account Manager for Royal Mail within CDS. For the last six years he has been a judge for the BIFM Awards, Innovation in Systems & Technology category. He has spent fifteen years acting as product owner of award winning IT solutions with multiple BIFM and PFM Innovation Award nominations, as well as delivering Enterprise IS systems to organisations in the financial, retail and public sectors. He is also a respected blogger and commentator on the burgeoning ‘PropTech’ industry.

6

Business need

7

Due to the very complex nature of its property estate, Royal Mail holds a unique contractual relationship with its FM Supplier. This is a long-standing relationship which was focused on reducing costs to Royal Mail as well as delivering a better service to its customers.

With a large complex estate and high volumes of reactive maintenance work the challenge was to ensure that up-to-date information was presented as a dashboard to improve supplier performance. An additional challenge faced by the company was to manage and respond to emerging risks before they impact on its mail operation.

Equally, data was increasingly driving decision-making across the business, a key strategic driver for Royal Mail, and therefore the art of the possible was understood and sharing of data was a key requirement.

Royal Mail presented CDS with some key requirements/outcomes that needed to be achieved:

• Help improve the performance of the FM supply chain.

• Focus on eliminating / minimising disruption of the mail operation from a property facilities perspective.

• Provide a dynamic dashboard linked to KPI performance on a mobile device.

• Create an interface into the supplier data warehouse, refreshed four times a day that creates a client side data set and mitigates data/supplier ‘lock in’.

• Provide Royal Mail with visibility of reactive maintenance.

• Pro-actively manage performance.

• Help budget setting through targeted and accurate investment in the estate and its assets.

• Provide insight to asset condition to help inform asset replacement decisions.

CDS was able to deliver all of these in full with its Asset Factory Solution.

Solution

9

For the past five to ten years or so, the FM sector has led the way in the use of technology in the wider property sector. This has included the use of mobile technology to make operations more responsive, web based self-service offering to customers, as well as data integration at a system-to-system level – even Internet of Everything, with devices generating equipment side data to alert on condition or status. No other Industry has been as innovative in terms of “PropTech”.

However, FM is just one element of running a property estate.

• In the real estate area – tenures, leases, rents, rates, service charges, landlord agreements etc. all need management.

• In the energy and waste area - consumption, cost, CO2, DECs EPCs etc. all need management.

• With respect to capital projects and programmes – costs, slippages, risks, dependencies all need management.

Solutions are in place, but if not joined up or aggregated they only allow property managers to see their estate in a silo and manage based on hard objective measurements only.

So solutions need to encourage data integration.

Furthermore, increasingly enlightened organisations are thinking about the people in the properties and the outcomes, value and productivity of those people. i.e. qualitative and subjective matters. They are also recognising the value of their properties in the attraction and retention of staff.

With increasingly outsourced arrangements in the property sector, the data ownership risk looms large for clients. Having technology that allows organisations to deal with these points going forward with an independent and trusted source, and mitigates data and supplier lock-in, is key.

Asset Factory allows you to measure the value, cost, risk and performance of your property estate from all angles. It presents actionable insight and goes as far as possible down the route of driving the data to make decisions.

Uniquely, it also captures data from qualitative systems (e.g. Leesman) to blend hard and soft measures, so a balanced view is understood – i.e. “the building is expensive to maintain, but staff enjoy visiting/working in it, utilise it best and are also most productive. It also attracts talent in the way it looks.”

Tablet based dashboard application

10

In the case of Royal Mail, CDS developed Asset Factory to analyse FM data from the company’s FM supplier. Reactive, planned and asset condition data is gathered and then reported on.

The main ‘use cases’ for the solution are that Operations Managers and Directors have a solution that allows two-way stakeholder management:

• Being able to show the mail centre, distribution centre and delivery office managers that the FM service delivery is under control, operating legally and meeting required service levels.

• Being able to ensure that the FM supplier is dealing with high risk issues that affect operations and mail delivery, in a timely manner.

Royal Mail demands high levels of performance from their assets and facilities and Asset Factory helps keep operations running smoothly. Take the humble water boiler referenced earlier – this provides suitable refreshment for staff during their breaks.

Reactive Work Order data from the FM provider is analysed four times a day. Planned Maintenance Work Order data, once a week and Asset condition data, quarterly.

Blending asset condition data with actual reactive data allows the client to see the true picture of how an asset is performing, especially if it is coming to the end of its expected life. It allows budgets to be set based upon real -time and trusted data from the operational systems.

Technically the solution has a very simple architecture:

• A Powerful Integration Layer – this ensures that data can be harvested over multiple communications mediums and formats, email, SFTP, web browser mapping tool and web services.

• A Flexible Data Layer - A Datawarehouse & unique property schema based on CDS’s collective Property skills and heritage.

• A Best in class Presentation Layer – Asset Factory leverages the Microstrategy mobile app for iOS and Android. We operate a mobile first strategy, delivering to tablet based computing.

Asset Factory Target Operating Model (TOM)

Implementation

12

The journey to implementation started in May 2015. Although Asset Factory can analyse and aggregate multiple datasets, in multiple formats over multiple interfaces, we recommend our clients initially work with single data sets in an agile methodology.

CDS was commissioned to work on a Proof of Concept (POC) based on a limited scope and single data feed. Within a month the technology was ready and in June 2015 we commenced the POC.

In three months the proof of concept had been ‘proven’ and so in September 2015 the scope was expanded as described above. On the 4th Dec 2015, the service went live.

Training the users was done in classroom style meetings ensuring that all users were using the solution in the manner it was expected – i.e. all had tablets and all had the app installed on their devices.

From the outset, Royal Mail laid out the reasons for the project and that ultimately this was to help maintain and improve its service to customers.

Weekly meetings to track the project were held. Establishing a meaningful mapping of project resources enabled technical discussions to happen directly and fast, removing blockers as and when they arose.

It wasn’t always plain sailing – some complexity and lessons learned were:

• What is the right hardware for the task? Windows and android devices were considered and discounted.

• How do you want to present the dashboard? – It needs to be intuitive and simple and balance the tactical and strategic reporting nature of the requirements.

• Check the data for quality and accuracy. Trust in the data is key.

• Spend time testing the outputs and ensure all stakeholders are engaged. Test when it’s time to test, not after it’s gone LIVE.

• Follow-up with users and feedback any improvements to consolidate usage – this was done regularly and bugs eliminated/tweaks made in the run-up to ‘operational readiness’.

Royal Mail – Facilities Performance Dashboard

Benefits realised

14

As a judge in award schemes in Facilities Management are you constantly frustrated with the lack of evidence or numbers in respect to commercials?

Let’s try to put that right.

The business case for Asset Factory has been established in the following areas:

• Time saved (daily work patterns).

• Risk avoided (operations maintained).

• insight leading to better use of money.

In a recent survey that followed up on the use of the tool and gathered developmental feedback, the users rated some areas but also provided some insight into time saved and risks mitigated.

In the feedback from Royal Mail users, 83% said the solution had saved them at least two days work since December 2015, and 17% said it had saved then up to five days. Extrapolated across a full year (the survey was conducted seven months in), this represented considerable cost savings.

In terms of risk avoided and operations maintained in an estate of this size and complexity it is hard to measure. However, given the level of use by the teams using the tool and the level of intervention, this could be significant Avoiding cost is not just about saving money, but also about preventing service levels to customers falling and also other uses for the time saved.

Without looking at the insight leading to better use of investment – the business case has already been met. In addition, Asset Factory is now allowing the senior members of the Facilities Management team in Royal Mail to budget more effectively in the maintenance of equipment. This will have far-reaching consequences in terms of the smooth running of Royal Mail’s property estate going forward.

If Asset Factory has saved you time (since using it) can you estimate?

1hr – 12hrs

12 – 48hrs

2 days – 5 days

1 week – 2 weeks

Zero time saved

83.3%

16.7%

15

Here is some feedback from Royal Mail users:

“The system is really good in helping us get an understanding of the level of service being provided within our patch so a welcome addition to our toolbox”

“Asset Factory is used whilst visiting delivery office managers to provide information relevant to them and to ensure jobs raised have been completed on time. It is used during performance meetings with the FM Supplier to check on data. It is reliable and gives as much up-to-date information as possible.”

“It allows you to drill down into specific postcodes/sites and disciplines, eg, BFM, BES etc. It is supplier data therefore it should be correct.”

“I used Asset Factory two to three times a week to support my role to see where jobs have failed or are about to. I analyse the data to see if there is a trend in the jobs being raised day after day without proper fixes being provided from the supplier.”

“Since the extra training I am now able to access data in a timely manner and raise queries with relevant supply chain management for answers on specific issues.”

“Usage of planned / compliance data. Holding sessions with supply chain managers to go through data when undertaking a SOFT (safety observation feedback tour) with Supplier. Review outstanding reactive jobs and have a conversation with the PIC (Person in Control). Improves customer management.”

“Better visibility of jobs about to fail so more targeted chasing can take place when required.”

“I mostly use it to check on work coming into the helpdesk daily for my patch. This helps me decide what I might need to look into further or be aware of where my support is needed, as well as reviewing the outstanding jobs I need to chase.”

“The WOQ (work order query) is very useful when out and about or on-site and I need to investigate event numbers/history.”

“Also I check the volume of work across my patch, at a national level and fault categories. The latter is helpful to better understand particular areas of poor performance.”

What’s next

17

Maintaining the highest standards of operational performance remains Royal Mail’s key objective. As the nature of the relationship between the company and its FM supplier changes, Asset Factory will become more of a decision-making tool. As more and more data is collected and analysed, the technology can also be used to model different scenarios and explore what-if planning.

This will help to eliminate / minimise issues impacting on Royal Mail’s operations from a property perspective.

It also improves supplier performance in more discreet ways than hard measures previously managed to do.

It will assist in asset replacement and forward investment planning.

Energy and Risk management in the same dashboard.

Clearly the dashboard is benefiting the team using it; eliminating more manually intensive tasks and work that could only be done offline or in unsociable hours.

Asset Investment Planning