Hot property for real estate management
BNP Paribas Real Estate is Europe’s leading property manager with 40 million m2 under management, advising private and public sector clients across all property types including commercial, residential and rural real estate.
The company has operated in the UK property market for over 150 years and built a reputation for being a proactive, innovative long-term partner for its clients. Occupier experience and building performance is at the heart of BNP Paribas’ strategy, and it aims to drive value across the full lifecycle of each property and asset to meet commercial, environmental and customer experience objectives.
Real estate for a changing world
To help manage FM services and management of the UK portfolio of 600 properties, BNP Paribas Real Estate chose QFM computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software from Service Works Global in 2012. Help Desk Manager, Christine Hazzard is responsible for ensuring excellent service delivery across the country from an extensive team of suppliers.
“Our properties range from industrial estates to retail centres to offices, and we manage land across the UK containing or connecting to gas holders. Each site really is unique. QFM’s Property module is invaluable as it helps us manage the volume of information, and it’s flexible enough that we can choose how to do this.”
Detailed records can be added to each property within QFM, allowing BNP Paribas to comprehensively monitor data such as lease expirations, rental agreements, square footage, tenants’ names and contact details, and whether the FM team are required to manage the whole property or just the public areas. As this information is stored centrally, everything is readily available and easy to find.
Configurable alerts can be created in QFM to ensure critical information is not overlooked. BNP Paribas has created such popups for health and safety to protect the FM team – for example to alert of asbestos in a property, or to advise of trespassers residing in an area of National Grid land.
Help desk and automation
Working with a large mobile maintenance team and sites up and down the UK requires a slick, well organized help desk to ensure that BNP Paribas can continue to meet the high standards required by its customers. A team of eight use QFM’s integrated help desk functionality to rapidly capture reactive maintenance requests, prioritize tasks and identify unresolved calls to ensure jobs are resolved quickly. Workflows can be implemented and tailored to company requirements to further speed up the process. When a job is logged, for example the air conditioning is broken at a particular site, QFM will automatically assign the correct SLA as well as the operative who has the right skills to fix it.
Hazzard explains: “The admin tools within QFM give me great control over how we use the system. I’ve created workflows which hugely help my team as they don’t have to remember every contractor or SLA – QFM automates it all. If there is an emergency, the SLA can be manually overridden, so it’s still flexible. This process saves massive amounts of time for the help desk.” She continues: “QFM is a brilliant system. We can decide what we want to capture and what we don’t need – about each site before a job can be completed.”
Friction-free reporting
BNP Paribas is a company that prides itself on intimate knowledge of local markets combined with global market intelligence, and the same is true of its internal teams where a strong data focus is upheld. The help desk team is required to respond to adhoc queries from the contractors, create regular progress reports for each client and monthly performance reports for the Board to quantify how they are supporting each site. QFM comes with a comprehensive array of reporting tools as standard, which transforms data into meaningful and actionable insight. Custom dashboards show live information through different reporting panels which can be edited and swapped out as required, and data can also
be downloaded into applications such as Microsoft Excel.
“We can manipulate the data and design our own reports within QFM. All our clients have different requirements, but we can easily build reports to suit their needs. I’ve even set up a few automated reports for the Board which saves so much time,” says Hazzard.
“QFM has transformed our monthly business reporting. Everything is clear as all the data is in one place, and we’ve become less reactive and more strategic as a result. We are able to identify trends in asset maintenance. For example, rather than wasting time and money in constantly sending an engineer out for a regular fault on the same asset, we can make a proactive choice to investigate, see what the bigger issue is and prevent it from breaking down in the first place. We’re getting far more out of the reporting side of QFM than we ever thought we would.”
The help desk team also uses QFM’s Event Director module extensively to keep track of outstanding works, impending deadlines and performance levels.
“We couldn’t live without Event Director,” enthuses Hazzard. Event Director categorises jobs by color– red, amber or green depending on their deadline, allowing the help desk to clearly see when action needs to be taken in order to keep a job on track. Users can log in and see different information, depending on their rights set by the administrator. BNP Paribas have different views for the regional offices, clients and contractors, with each user only able to see specific data to maintain security and GDPR compliance. This reduces calls to the help desk as live information is easily accessible either on QFM or downloaded onto spreadsheets.
Customer-focused training
SWG invests substantial resources into QFM to ensure the software continues to meet the needs of an evolving profession and is committed to delivering outstanding service to all clients. Support can be obtained through a 24/7 online portal, via phone or through in-person training. BNP Paribas booked a training session for the help desk team on upgrading their system, which took place at their own site.
Integration
Data management has become a top priority in FM, and managing it between multiple systems without
duplication or error can be a challenge. BNP Paribas uses a commercial property management system to keep track of new clients, suppliers and contractors, and is the main source of information across the business. SWG integrated the two systems, allowing QFM to be kept up to date without needing to rekey the new information each time. Now data can be seamlessly shared between them, eliminating time consuming and error-prone manual work.
The company’s finance system has also been integrated with QFM, which allows the BNP Paribas FM team to manage contractor purchase orders (PO) and payments in a more efficient manner. Each time a job is raised, a PO is generated in the finance system with the same reference number.
When each contractor submits an invoice for completed work, referencing the job number, it can be easily linked to the PO. QFM keeps an audit trail of the original quote, who approved the amount and the date of payment. Hazzard summarises: “There’s no paperwork or fuss, and our systems are always up to date.”
Future focus
Following the success of the current system integrations, the company plans to expand on this with a further integration. BNP Paribas’ health and safety software contains essential documents such as building assessments, hazard registers and compliance measures for the whole real estate portfolio. Currently, the help desk team must anticipate the risks that each contractor may face, such as asbestos or working at height, and present them with a form to sign.
Integration with QFM will mean the health and safety documents will be stored against each site, making them easier to find, and the signed form will be saved against the job to present an audit trail and ensure safety across the workforce. The team plans to expand its use of QFM self-service functionality, which is currently used by the help desk and FM contractors. A small number of buildings have also been given the capacity to log jobs and make requests via self-service, which has been very well received by the tenants. Communication is improved as the tenants receive an email confirmation when the request is submitted and the job completed. And as the job is logged on the system straight away, resolution times are improved.”
