The Power of Partnership
Published: 27 January, 2011
This month Capital Shopping Centres formed a ‘Facilities Alliance’ with two suppliers to provide hard and soft services across its portfolio. How will this ground-breaking deal work?
The move is thought to be a first in the industry with the Alliance working on an incentivised risk and reward basis in a bid to work in partnership to drive innovation, consistency and accountability.
The Alliance will include Capital Shopping Centres’s operational team, soft service supplier Europa and hard service provider Inviron.
Europa Support Services will continue its five-year strong relationship with Capital Shopping Centres in providing soft services at Metrocentre in Gateshead, Eldon Square in Newcastle, The Potteries in Stoke-on-Trent, The Victoria Centre in Nottingham and Chapelfield in Norwich.
In addition Europa will mobilise a further five new sites including The Glades in Bromley, Lakeside in Thurrock, Braehead in Glasgow, The Chimes in Uxbridge and The Harlequin in Watford.
Hard services specialists Inviron will provide M&E service management including reactive maintenance and fire officer duties at each location.
The two contractors will work closely with Capital Shopping Centres on shared objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
“The formation of this new Alliance will help Capital Shopping Centres strengthen and consolidate our facilities management provision to better position us for future growth and change,” says Trevor Pereira, commercial director of Capital Shopping Centres.
“The success of this working partnership is absolutely vital to Capital Shopping Centres in continuing to manage a safe, secure and clean environment at our centres, whilst offering retailers real value.
“The alliance represents a significant focus on commitment to working together with openness, honesty and engagement.
Our chosen partners within the Facilities Alliance instinctively recognise that every aspect within our centres contributes to our customers’ experience.”
Jeremy Waud – who will be speaking at the Shopping Centre Conference in London in March – is managing director of Incentive FM which advised Capital Shopping Centres during the 12 month bidding process. Incentive FM has also advised Touchwood, Bluewater and Hammerson in the last year.
“The Alliance is a virtual company at national and local level, made up of the client operational team and the hard and soft service providers,” he explains.
“The bond is similar to that of a TFM contract and the idea is that the partners act, feel and behave together in their objectives.”
Incentive FM set about designing the model and identifying potential bidders which included Europa, GBM, Integral, MITIE, OCS, Inviron and Interserve. A briefing session took place in a London hotel where the new partnering model was explained.
And according to Waud, all bidders bought in to the concept.
“It was an extra step in the procurement process,” says Waud. “We believe it’s novel and different and to our knowledge nobody’s done it before.
“It’s a different culture of doing and shaping things and not about beating up on price - determining the price by level of performance is not an issue.”
The Alliance is based on the idea that cost and performance is rewarded – if one partner handles a project well then the other partner shares the reward and, conversely, if one side does a bad job, both parties are penalised.
Waud explains: “If the M&E suppliers wildly overspent, the soft service providers would also pick up part of that pain and if they performed well and operated within the budget they would share the gains too. If one partner starts to perform less well the other partner is incentivised to help them – so it’s a novel way of doing things.
“In the past, they tended to get in each other’s way - it can be that the M&E contractors want to come in a do a repair but the soft services side say ‘No, we’re cleaning, you can’t come in and do that’ and we want to get away from that by making sure they don’t trip each other up.
“The theory behind this is to bring the best of the three together by acting as an incentive for the partners to work as a team.”
Other benefits include depth of management resource, working towards common goals and ambitions, sharing best practice and industry advice and training and development opportunities.
During the bidding process, the Capital Shopping Centres team even did detailed and extensive tours of the contractor’s operations offices.
After all the site visits and technical evaluations were done Incentive FM ranked, related and scored all the bidders.
Pereira is pleased with the outcome.
“The partners proved, through an incredibly robust and rigorous tender process, that they could create solutions that would meet our requirements in a consolidated, cost-effective way,” he says. “More than anything, their focus on the welfare and development of their people stood out in parallel with our own vision and values.
“Both partners were chosen due to the strength of their people and culture and the supportive relationship they provide. They displayed proven ability to lead, manage and deliver a range of services for significant benefit to the Capital Shopping Centres business and to our people.”
Inviron’s facility management and services director Neil Johnson is proud to be working with Capital Shopping Centres.
“Our strength in customer service and our reputation and experience in retail centre management provided Capital Shopping Centres with the confidence to appoint Inviron as its hard services partner,” he says.
“Our culture, similar brand values, and spirit of collaboration and co-operation fit perfectly and we’re looking forward to getting to grips with each of the centres as the contract begins and working in partnership with both Capital Shopping Centres and Europa.”
Greig Brown, Europa chief executive, adds: “This is a fantastic start to the New Year for Europa. Capital Shopping Centres has been a long-standing client and we’ve enjoyed a loyal and committed relationship with them over many years.
Their gravitas in the UK retail market and the expansion of this contract to a further five centres, now gives us a strength within this sector that sets us apart. We’re looking forward to working with the Facilities Alliance to deliver results and great service.”
Pereira says that the main priority now for the Facilities Alliance is to “ensure a smooth and welcoming transition and transformation to services with minimal impact on business.”
Pereira adds that the Alliance will work with Capital Shopping Centres throughout the early processes to ensure any change is communicated effectively.
His hope is that the Alliance will achieve evolutionary development of Capital Shopping Centres’s facilities services through 2011 and beyond and he looks forward to the Alliance delivering “great results and even greater service” to all stakeholders and customers through the new partnership.
“It was a cohesive, constructive and extremely thorough process,” says Waud. “It is very different but it’s definitely got potential and Capital Shopping Centres are excited about the fresh idea. Only time will tell just how well it works.”
