A rapid operational turnaround to save performance penalties and reduce the risk of losing a $2.5M Facility Management contract.
Our approach included a full operational performance review, building an operational framework and project monitoring tools.
Our team ensured lasting behavioural change while encouraging growth, long-term innovation and customer-centricity.
Following a recent mobilisation of a new contract to run one of the world’s largest shopping malls in the Middle East, the client was struggling to achieve the required KPI performances. The result was a high risk of performance-related fines plus the loss of a full 3-Year (+2) contract worth almost $15M. Over a three months turnaround period, we helped MallCo* to improve their KPI performance from 63% to 90% but even more critically, we ensured that the performance improvements would secure the full term contact length.
Essential to our approach was building standardised visual operating procedures for all roles within the mall. Many operators had limited English and therefore building visual guides was crucial. This approach included spending time on the front line, building SOPs from scratch, standardising processes and agreeing on quality and KPI standards with the end client. We also built daily checklists and Day In The Life (DILO) tools to ensure all requirements were captured and delivered daily, weekly and monthly. With a 24-hour operation and over 400 staff employed on the contract, a full work based breakdown was completed to highlight critical KPI risks and operational requirements. This generated opportunities to move work between various shifts to ensure more customer focus during MallCo’s opening hours. Through careful resource analysis, priority was given to customer critical processes ensuring required resourcing levels at all time.
Building visual operating procedures was critical to ensure that every member of the team knew the critical elements and risks of each process. With high impact visual documentation, over 43 processes were analysed, redesigned and documented and training given to all staff. The use of visuals (and some key translations when required) enabled the non-English speaking front-line staff to understand exactly what was needed and empowered them to escalate to management if any failure or potential failure was identified.
With the back-office management team, we also reviewed the entire KPI process from contract level to daily audit requirements. By prioritising system driven events, we monitored activity every hourly and by hourly performance tracking the team were able to foresee any potential risks to the KPI’s and adjust before any deadline had passed. A small rapid deployment team was also created. This team was deployed in case of any potential critical performance risks and were able to provide additional support to the operational teams.
Finally, we conducted a full zone analysis MallCo to identify resource requirements and allocated the right team structures based on this analysis. This ensured we were able to react to higher footfall across the mall and be proactive in the deployment rather than reactive.
*We take our client’s confidentiality serious. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.
