Where are your priorities? - Practical Facilities Management

efurbishment
MSL Retail Property
Care: Providing
round the clock
property maintenance
Over the past seven years, MSL Retail Property
Care has become one of the major national players
in reactive maintenance and general property
maintenance works. The company provides all
tradesmen from plumbers, electricians, roofers,
joiners and decorators through to glaziers, pest
control and locksmiths with many trades being
available on a two hour emergency response.
MSL have an extensive portfolio of customers
which span high street towns and cities across
the whole of the UK who have been drawn to
MSL because of the round-the-clock service for
all types of building maintenance works.
MSL’s Executive Director, Simon Thomson,
explains that “National Retail Companies and
businesses with many properties or stores
nationwide appreciate the benefits of dealing
with one company to resolve their building
maintenance problems. Many of our clients
have properties from the South Coast to
Scotland and using MSL for their maintenance
works creates consistency in terms of both quality
and price.”
MSL’s customer base
has also been diversifying
over the past
two years and using
their experience, values
and customer service
from maintenance works
within the high
street retail industry,
they have expanded
into property maintenance
for industry sectors including License,
Leisure, Retail and Office Parks, Bookmakers
and Housing Associations.
Having recently secured a number of contracts
for nationwide property maintenance, MSL
needed to expand their operations capacity to
handle the existing and increasing volumes of
maintenance works.
Traditionally, MSL have operated using a combination
of directly employed labour, operating
from their head office in Halifax and covering
the North of England, and key subcontractors
who have worked with MSL for many years. MSL
realised that it was important to increase the
number of direct labour maintenance engineers
in order to provide more centralised management
and allow for both current and future
increases in workload.
Neil Bonsor, Sales Manager, comments “The
requirement for MSL’s one-stop-shop building
maintenance service has grown rapidly over
recent years and therefore we have decided to
expand the number of our operational bases to
provide the capacity to increase staff, improve
provisioning and enhance customer service.”
MSL have recently opened a new branch office
which is located within the Stevenage area in a
3,500 sq. ft
premises housing
both offices and
storage facility. The
premises were completely
stripped and
refitted using MSL’s own
maintenance engineers.
The location
offers straightforward
access to both
the A1 and M25 with the base covering London
and the surrounding areas.
Additionally, MSL have created an additional
satellite operation in Birmingham to cover the
Midlands areas. All of the four current bases of
maintenance engineers are controlled from
MSL’s operations departments located in Halifax
and Stevenage.
A three year expansion plan for additional
branch and satellite operations are currently
being evaluated with an additional six bases
proposed by the end of 2008 to increase working
capacity in higher workload areas.
With additional regional offices, MSL’s IT department
have created a connected network of
computers allowing all offices access into the
custom in-house dataflow database ensuring upto-date
information is available for all offices
and remote workers.
The ability to update the database in real-time
from any location is very important for MSL
aligned with their strategy to have the most upto-date
information available for the client at
any time, the information is also available to
the client via a secure login system within which
the progress of their works can be tracked from
any computer with internet access 24 hours a
day.
MSL had previously evaluated a number of
helpdesk software products although concluded
that these did not offer the same flexibility as
an in-house custom developed package. Craig
Lorimer, Commercial Director, observes “In the
event that a customer requires a custom report
or add on to our system in order that MSL can
better provide maintenance services to them,
our programmers can incorporate the additional
facilities to the system.”
With their commitment to being responsive to
customer requirements, MSL set up a dedicated
quotations team to accelerate the turn around
to the client, and has a team of dedicated estimators
based at their offices in both Halifax and
Stevenage who also provide quality control
reporting back to Head Office. Furthermore
Helpdesk, Operations Staff and Customer Care
personnel have been increased, growing their
capacity for both current and future works.
MSL also offer small works services including
new roofs, new fire break walls, store remodelling,
office remodelling, warehouse renovations,
car park resurfacing, car park marking,
dilapidations, remedial works, recabling and
more.
Whether works are carried out by their own
tradesmen, or fully vetted and approved subcontractors,
MSL management remain in total
control of all works to ensure health & safety
regulations are upheld. MSL are CHAS
(Contractors Health & Safety Assessment
Scheme) approved (see www.chas.gov.uk) and
are fully committed to health and safety practices
and procedures.
Reader Reply No.: 84024
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