At Bluewater and Touchwood, Lend Lease has agreed to adopt a new concept in shopping centre FM called Retail Fusion. The centre owner will have a stake in the business through its Vita Lend Lease FM company, which has formed a new joint venture with Johnson FM and Intelligent Property Group.

The partners claim Retail Fusion has been tailored specifically for use in shopping centres with a retail-centric business model that reflects footfall, customer spend and the exacting demands of the centres and their retailers.

Key to the new service is fusionmonitor.net, a bespoke IT platform developed by IPG for the specialist shopping centre environment. The platform allows increased transparency of operation, enhanced stakeholder communication, flexible and robust financial controls, as well as real-time management reporting.

Vita Lend Lease obviously has significant knowledge and experience of shopping centre ownership and management, and Johnson FM - which grew out of the Sears Group's in-house FM operation - has a strong retail track record. Their aim is to use Bluewater and Touchwood as a test-bed before looking for new business elsewhere.

Johnson FM director Paul Lewis says: "Our feeling is that shopping centres have not been managed to their full potential in the past. Bluewater and Touchwood are two very different centres and we're looking to get two very solid operational models before we take it to the wider market."

At the same time Land Securities Group has opted for just one FM service provider agreement for all of its properties in Scotland and the North of England. The deal with OCS will replace more than 450 separate existing contracts in areas such as security, cleaning, facilities management, engineering and supply chain delivery, allowing Land Securities to dramatically streamline its supplier base.

The new contract, worth £8.5m pa, covers more than 10 of Land Securities' shopping centres and is set for implementation in February 2008.

The company's property management and operations division opted for a single contract because of a desire to significantly reduce the processing costs of dealing with numerous contractors. From an occupier's point of view the landlord says the deal will help keep a lid on service charge increases in the shopping centres in the coming year.

Yvonne Wells, director of property management at Land Securities, explains: "We are effectively altering our entire approach to property services and moving forward in our drive to simplify operations and enable us to continue to deliver higher quality services and more competitive service charge costs to occupiers of retail properties.

"We have deliberately chosen a route with a service partner because we want a long-term relationship that also delivers training and career paths for those who work with us." And she added: "It will be no surprise that we are now looking at extending this approach across the rest of our retail property operations business."

The announcement follows a detailed 18-month assessment of all Land Securities' support processes and service charge operations, spearheaded by Wells and other executives. Wells explains: "The team re-assessed the way in which every aspect of the service charge is delivered."

And she promises that a lower service charge is only one of the benefits that will flow from the single-source approach. She says: "Occupiers of our buildings should also benefit from improved services through the partnership approach with performance management incentives, transparency of costs, consistency of standards, and more focused teams."

The new strategy brings Land Securities in line with the revised service charge code of practice that came into effect in April this year, and the company aims to monitor progress under the new contract by expanding its regular customer satisfaction surveys to ensure occupiers are getting the right service.

"We are focused on creating what we intend to be seen as industry leading management and operations support for our occupiers," Wells said. "Land Securities is delivering a real sea change in the landlord-occupier relationship."

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