Trusted information, insight and advice is critical for estates directors and senior business leaders to make informed decisions about their property portfolios. Ian Sparkes, Operations Director - Property Professional Services, shares how Sodexo is helping to make those decisions easier.
At the recent Government Property Conference 2023, Sodexo shared the approach being taken to support clients to make sure that every pound spent is done so with the full knowledge of its intended impact.
While budgets are ever more squeezed, we are helping existing clients to make decisions about how they use their finite resources, justifying and protecting existing budgets, while also providing the level of detail and business cases required in the competition for funding.
Three priorities for 2023 should be:
1. Get clarity on complex estates decisions
Sodexo has developed a Building Performance Index which consolidates estates-related data across different parameters including: efficiency, sustainability, quality and operations. An agreed set of measures (which can be tailored to each client) feeds into the Building Performance Index with a resulting Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) style rating.
With thousands of individual data points feeding into the Building Performance Index, we are able to advise on stay/exit decisions on leased properties, where to invest life-cycle budget to move properties up the rating scale, as well as tracking improvement over time.
Public sector estates directors and their teams are facing increasingly complex challenges with competing priorities to reach such as Net Zero targets, ageing estates, levelling up, workplace experience, digitalisation and changing working patterns. Sodexo’s Building Performance Index provides an objective method to support strategic decisions and can be easily used to communicate to a variety of different stakeholders – supporting scrutiny and reasoning of decisions.
2. Make your operational budget go further
With the pressure to drive operational results, organisations can become unaware of their commercial performance and adherence to supplier contract terms. When managing an estate, the number of work orders, purchase orders and resulting invoices raised over the course of the year typically amounts to hundreds of thousands, meaning that if the end-to-end processes, systems and knowledge aren’t right – there’s substantial potential for budget leakage. Sodexo offers a combined service and systems solution to ensure:
- Goods and services deliver value for money in accordance with contractual terms
- Reduced administration for supplier, client and our cost management resources
- Greater cost certainty through accurate cost data
- Prompt payment to suppliers, many of which are SMEs
- Provision of auditable insight through reporting
- Focused and prioritised application of cost management resources resulting in greater value to the client
Through the use of systems our team of cost auditors can focus on the areas with the highest risk, and use the reporting and insight to delve deeper into areas of concern.
In addition to the smooth running of the process, and all the benefits of accurate information, we would expect typical cost avoidance of up to £2.5 million on a £50 million budget (dependent upon the maturity of the client’s existing approach).
Once embedded, we continue to use the approach to maintain quality and accuracy of submissions and therefore sustaining value unlocked. It maintains increased quality of supplier estimates, applications for payment and invoicing and supports client second and third line of defence auditing.
3. Choose full visibility of your compliance
A well-established performance method for maintenance contracts is to measure and report on the number of planned statutory and mandatory tasks due, and whether they were completed on time. On the surface, this seems like a suitable approach, and as long as all of the tasks are completed on time, the building would logically be compliant. However, this only focuses on the tip of the iceberg – the completion of one stage of the process and is only one part of the full picture to get full visibility of compliance.
As a result of insufficient visibility of the full end-to-end maintenance process, owners, occupiers and managers are often unknowingly at risk of non-compliance. This ‘iceberg of ignorance’ effect can present a misleading compliant position, when in fact, below the surface the unreported actual position is non-compliant.
All these elements need to be verified to provide the accountable individual with the confirmation that their buildings are meeting the requirements of the law.
Periodic auditing is typically used to test compliance. These are a snapshot in time, limited by resource and do not provide visibility across the full depth and breadth of the estate.
Using the Compliance Performance Index all elements of statutory compliance are checked including:
- All physical assets requiring maintenance were known.
- The correct maintenance task was assigned to the asset.
- The maintenance was completed to the required standard, and in accordance with the relevant regulations and standards.
- Any remedials were raised, completed and documented.
- Documentary evidence has been provided to prove the work has been completed.
- The dates of the work correspond with the dates on the certificate or report.
The Compliance Performance Index provides clients with the equivalent of a full compliance audit across their whole estate every day of the year with actionable insights that can be used to reduce risk. Focusing on known areas of risk rather than auditing to find them ensures better value from these resources and an improved, and clear compliance position.
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