Bullring

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Bullring
Case Study Document

Background

Bullring is the exciting commercial face of Birmingham in the 21st century. Opened in 2003 at a cost of £500 million, the 40-acre site incorporates historical landmarks and ground breaking modern architecture in a space that is the equivalent of 26 football pitches.

The nine-level centre acknowledges its historical heritage by bringing back to life long-vanished city street names, whilst looking to the future
with its already iconic skyplane roof dominating the landscape.

It is estimated that more than 30 million visitors flock to the centre, which has more than 160 shops and boutiques, not to mention its 25 restaurants – all of which have created jobs for 8,000 people – in search of retail therapy, taking advantage of Bullring's car parking (3,100 spaces), revitalised transport facilities and state of the art washrooms. For business customers, there is a suite of full serviced conference rooms.

With top quality service essential for its retailers and their customers, from the outset, automation was considered the key to effective management of the vast complex, with its diverse range of tenants – everything from small independent outlets to retail icons like Selfridges and Debenhams – spaces and assets.

Network manager Ben Darji worked with Bullring's development team from the beginning of 2003 through to the grand opening in September 2003 and remains closely involved with the daily running of the centre.

"It was very exciting being part of the process of bringing the centre to the state where it is today," he says. "We had one scope in mind from the start: to ensure that Bullring was viewed as the most technologically advanced centre, not just in the UK but in Europe! Our initial scope was to eliminate any manual processes from the buildings management operation, and make it as seamless as possible."

Ben and his team already had some knowledge of Concept™, FSI's Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) software system and it was quickly adopted as the automation platform of choice.

"In terms of market leaders, Concept™ was really the only system we found which could deliver what we were looking to deliver to our users on that size and scale," he says. "It was a question of looking at the whole package, and Concept™ just had everything."

Challenge

In some respects, Ben and his team had the luxury of starting with a clean sheet when it came to automating Bullring's facilities management operation. But he points out that this didn't preclude the challenge of integrating Concept™ with other systems, including the building management system and the centre's Intranet.

"You could never do a retrospective fit on that, without it entailing a complete systems overhaul," he says. "In our case, we integrated it from the start so that it was never a standalone item. It was important that the system was part of our key operations from the word go.

"Implementation did involve some bigger items - Planned Preventative Maintenance, for example. That was essentially a data collation exercise and it was ongoing for some time before and after the centre opened, which we had anticipated. For the rest, most of the modules were fully operational from the time Bullring opened."

The essential thing, adds Ben, was to automate communications between the facilities management teams, the onsite maintenance teams and the retailers occupying premises in the centre.

"Our end-users – the retailers – can log faults via their own portal on the centre's Intranet, and these go straight into Concept™," he says. "The system automates billing, PPM schedules, and task and job assignments for both internal staff and maintenance workers. We've really used it to maximise the benefits of automation."

Benefits

While users at the Bullring's retail outlets have access to the system via the Intranet, its primary users are the onsite facilities management teams and maintenance teams who are constantly monitoring the logging, status, progress and closing of jobs.

"You can only really appreciate the true value and worth of a system like Concept™ if it's suddenly not there for any reason," says Ben. "But at Bullring, the benefits aren't just about improved efficiency; financially, it's equally important.

"Concept™ demonstrates where, potentially, weaknesses could lie in the facilities management workforce, by providing an audit trail for a task, from logging to completion. And we use it to accentuate the positives as well. For example, it gives us the ability to schedule ahead for periods when it might be time to bring in extra staff. We can use it to give us a historic method of understanding the ratio of staff and workers to how busy the centre is, and base our calculations on reports created by the system."

Ben says the partnership between Bullring and FSI has worked well in both directions. "I've found FSI to be very adaptable and flexible with regard to our requirements," he continues. "They took the time to understand what we were trying to do as far as integrating Concept™ with our internal systems was concerned. A certain amount of tailoring was required and they did that in a proactive way. It was never a question of simply taking the product off the shelf and telling us, 'You will do it this way,' which can be the case with some software suppliers."

As Concept™ supports the day-to-day management of the Bullring complex, Ben and his team are constantly looking forward to extending its use and reaping more benefits from an automated operation.

"One key thing we are looking at is mobility," he says. "We are trying out the use of handheld devices to assign to our engineers on site, with a view to automating task and job allocation whilst they are mobile. We'll be investigating
how Concept™ can support that initiative."