Dalkia

Dalkia is one of the UK’s leading facilities and
energy management companies with many clients
across the commercial, industrial, retail, healthcare
and public sectors. It has more than 3,000 staff
responsible for the management of, and service
delivery to, some 50,000 client-sites throughout
the country.

Background

The roots of Dalkia lie with the parent company Veolia back in the early 1850's. In the UK, the business history started in the mid 1890's. Since then the business has grown through good Customer Focused selling and the acquisition of complementary organisations.

In recent years, the strategy has been to consolidate these companies under the Dalkia brand – a complex process that entailed considerable business system integration behind the scenes. By 2003, the need for an integrated reactive and planned works management system had become a priority, and Dalkia embarked on a project to choose a CAFM system capable of managing service delivery across the entire business.

"We were moving from a situation that was customer site based to one where we wanted to measure company performance across all sites, and to report effectively across all areas of the business," says Mark Absalom, Dalkia's Director of Productivity, Productivity Improvement Team, who managed the project.

"This meant implementing single integrated business systems. It started by consolidating the financial systems on Oracle, and we then turned our attention to works management.

"We built a specification that recorded and rationalised the needs of the whole business. It was a major challenge to visualise how a CAFM system would work in an environment with a multitude of FM customers in different business sectors. We ran many workshops to involve the business in the project and keep them informed of progress through the procurement, development and delivery process."

FSI's Concept™ system was chosen after a detailed dialogue between the Dalkia project team and a number of market leading CAFM supply companies.

"The people behind the product won the order as much as the product itself," says Mark. "Given the volume of planned and reactive work that we have to manage across our customer base, our requirements were rather different to those of a single site. It seemed to us that the people at FSI were more focused on what we as the customer needed."

Challenge

Concept™ was installed for Dalkia's Customer Service Centre in September 2005, following an intensive 18-month specification, development and commissioning project. The helpdesk is used for reactive call logging and management to closure with workflow creating some critical customer and engineering communications. Every job is measured against either contract or Dalkia SLA's.

The use of workflow was a particularly important element of the project, enabling the integration of Concept™ with Dalkia's Oracle financial platform helping to realise the vision of a consolidated infrastructure to manage work and cost. The system has since been rolled out to the company's regional teams and the ongoing project will eventually introduce it into every sector of Dalkia's business.

"To help with ongoing new business mobilisations we specified a series of workflows to handle the importing of business data into Concept™.  We also write most of our Crystal reports and simple workflows." says Mark.

Tailoring Concept™ to meet the exacting needs of Dalkia's specification was an exciting challenge for everyone involved in the project. For example, the PPM module was developed to allow Dalkia to develop business specific maintenance regimes to satisfy a wide range of customer requirements across the full building portfolio.

However whilst the implementation project was demanding, most of the really difficult challenges have been in helping our staff to take advantage of the opportunities that come from working with the system. It is quite a culture change. According to Mark, managing the introduction of CAFM to Dalkia was as much a challenge as the specification and implementation of the system itself.

"It's a question of changing the hearts and minds of people who have previously been used to working in different environments with different systems," he says. "We are responsible for a wide range of sites in many different sectors, and the delivery of a wide range of services. We needed the system to help us manage that very carefully and we needed the people who manage the service delivery to work with the system rather than outside it. You cannot underestimate the impact of asking people to accept change."

The successful adoption of CAFM is, he suggests, about both getting the system to support the way we work and getting the business users to work with the system as part of their lives.

"Once you're able to develop management routines based on performance reporting, you can start to identify areas where real work is needed. That is what we wanted from FSI and Concept™."

Benefits

The implementation of Concept™ has enabled Dalkia to both streamline service delivery for its existing customers and to attract new business thanks to the clarity and detail of its performance and service reporting.

"Because the people delivering the services work in a managed environment, it means the customer can see the status of all our planned and reactive work, and we make sure that jobs don't get forgotten," says Mark. We have provided web based access for both our customers and our management performance reporting. This provides excellent focus on the achievement of customer satisfaction.

"Our ongoing relationship with FSI as the system supplier continues to be advantageous to both sides and the support received from FSI has been good. Due to the size of the system, the number of business sectors it supports and the number of users, we have had to work with FSI to enhance a number of areas of Concept™. Many of these developments are now standard in the main Concept™ product."

"Concept™ is now a core part of our works management process and it has supported us through the changes that our business has undergone in recent years. We are driven by our Customer expectations so the system must be a
day-to-day tool that enables us to effectively deliver our contractual responsibilities".

"Concept™ is a flexible and powerful tool and our Dalkia business is becoming good at using the system and finding new ways to apply it to improve our customer services. Our customers like the fact that we have a quality controlled works management system with clear reporting readily available through the web site."