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How can the UK’s largest water-only supplier manage and maintain its facilities across multiple sites and office spaces? Idox’s CAFM Explorer® provides the solution!
Operating across multiple sites and locations can be quite a challenge, especially for a company delivering essential products and services. With facilities being used around the clock by staff, contractors, and more, facilities managers need to consistently ensure they are always in top working order. With Idox’s CAFM Explorer®, that job becomes easier.
Affinity Water is the largest water-only supplier in the UK, delivering on average 950 million litres of safe, high-quality drinking water to 3.6 million customers every day. With over 600 sites, offices spread across 25 locations, and a vast network of contracting suppliers, the team needed a solution that could ensure streamlined operations around the clock and help them plan, manage, assign, and track jobs more efficiently. After reviewing several different providers, the company chose to invest in Idox’s CAFM Explorer®– a reliable, all-in-one facilities management solution that helps streamline FM tasks.
According to Anna Gur, Regional Facilities Manager at Affinity Water: “We did a lot of research before deciding to invest in CAFM Explorer®. It’s versatile and customisable and unlike some competitive solutions there are no extra charges for adding modules, making it a flexible and scalable solution that can adapt to the business’ needs.”
Via CAFM Explorer’s® web-based, self-service Help Desk, the team now has a central digital hub to log all planned maintenance and reactive work orders, as well as the ability to allocate, monitor, and review SLAs and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each contractor. By issuing work orders to contractors, CAFM Explorer® helps Affinity Water with mobile workforce management.
“CAFM Explorer® allows us to schedule and administer maintenance jobs, view open jobs, and run monthly reports on outstanding jobs. It provides insightful data, real-time tracking, and automatic notifications, which helps us keep on top of SLAs as well as highlight jobs that have crossed SLAs. Accordingly, we can chase contractors and update the person who raised the job,” Anna explains.
CAFM Explorer’s® reporting capabilities have also been crucial for the company in ensuring compliance across multiple sites. Anna comments: “The software helped with our National Quality Assurance (NQA) audits during lockdown. While normally, auditors would come in for site assessments, during the 18 months they were able to conduct the audits remotely. CAFM Explorer® made it easy for us to share the planned preventive maintenance (PPM) planner with the auditors – confirming that we were fulfilling our duties with regards to gas maintenance, triple checks, portable appliance testing (PAT) testing, etc.”
As a result of deploying CAFM Explorer®, Affinity Water has been able to maintain a tighter grip on FM tasks, as well as achieve better visibility across its multiple sites. As both planned and reactive maintenance is managed via the system, all maintenance-related tasks are now monitored within one centralised dashboard, enabling the team to effectively keep track of work progress and gain operational efficiency. By streamlining maintenance management tasks, the software also saves time and makes life easier for the workforce. “Rather than trawling through hundreds of emails, it’s far more convenient to go onto the system and look at outstanding jobs. Plus, if a contractor is on leave on a particular day, the system updates automatically, thereby helping in task planning and allocation,” Anna points out.
Summing up the team’s overall experience of working with Idox, Anna says: “The support service from Idox has been brilliant throughout. We were given remote training sessions during the product implementation, which was extremely beneficial and if we don’t understand something, the support staff takes the time to make video calls and talk us through it, right down to the smallest detail.”
While the FM team at Affinity Water has been primarily focused on getting the Help Desk function up and running, going forward, they plan to utilise other modules of CAFM Explorer®.
As demand for efficient delivery of essential products and services continues to grow, facilities managers are challenged to keep pace with innovative technological trends and solutions. Accessibility to work orders, maintenance requests, and resource inventory are now top priorities for facilities managers and users, especially in a hybrid working environment. CAFM Explorer’s® web-based software provides all users with the ability to access, send, and receive their requirements from their mobile devices and laptops, ensuring visibility, real-time response, and all-around efficiency.
CAFM Explorer® is more than just software, it is the essential partner for the innovative, forward-thinking facilities manager. Idox works across sectors such as healthcare, government, education, tourism, and more. Read about the four ways CAFM Explorer® can help you move from reactive to proactive facilities management in our blog here.
