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In a previous blog post I wrote about the importance of staying in control of your contracts. This post serves to illustrate a recent example of this where a customer was mis-charged for eight years. In today’s fast-paced business world, companies with large workforces, particularly those in clinical environments, rely heavily on efficient, outsourced services to maintain operations. When those services falter, the impact can be widespread, affecting recruitment, staff welfare, and even company financial performance. Third parties are as critical to the supply chain as your internal resource. Recently, a 6,000-employee organisation, faced such a challenge with its outsourced Occupational Health (OH) services. This blog post demonstrates how, with the help of Insider Pro, the company turned things around, reclaiming significant overcharges and improving service delivery without increasing costs.

Property directors and facilities management companies are always under pressure to reduce costs in everything that they do, but there often comes a point when a cheaper alternative fails to deliver the service that is required.

When I tell people that my passion is procurement, most people move on to ask the person next to me what they do for a living. A few others ask questions about the biggest tender I have ever dealt with, or how I feel about supermarkets bullying tactics with food growers and the like.

The uninitiated think that as procurement professionals we spend our time creating tender documents and beating up suppliers on price.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Our approach is VERY different.

Because all restaurant “products” are for human consumption, any maintenance issues that affect food storage and preparation can, at best, lead to wasted food and at worst, the possibility of illness and/or legal action.

These are unique features of the restaurant business.  If you then overlay the potential costs of restaurant downtime due to property issues, it is easy to see that having robust maintenance contracts, procedures and trusted contractors are critical elements for the profitable running of restaurants.

So how can companies reduce maintenance costs without increasing risk?

This case study illustrates the approach InsiderPro took with one of our customers, reducing both risks and costs to the tune of £850,000 per year.

We recently worked with a chain of restaurants in the UK casual dining sector who wanted to reduce the cost of maintenance across all properties and equipment used by the group. 

They thought we would be looking to negotiate new contracts. 

Our approach and the impact that we had took them by surprise...

Our consultancy work at Euramax Solutions Ltd caused them to think differently about the challenges they were facing in the business.

Casual dining restaurants have created mini food factories around the globe where consistency, quality, speed and value are key. Downtime costs each restaurant hundreds if not thousands of pounds per minute in lost sales and spoiled product.

So, when a restaurant chain approached us to help reduce their maintenance cost, reducing risk as well as cost was at the forefront of our minds.

If your procurement team took steps to reduce the total cost of ownership for a piece of equipment, they’d probably deserve a pat on the back (at least!).

But what if they took a further step and looked at the function of that piece of equipment and determined a better way?

We worked with a national builder and cut £millions off their cost base, moving their business from being uncompetitive to one of the most profitable in the industry.

We worked with a retailer who was struggling to enter new markets and deliver sales growth to meet their targets.