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Servitor helps put East Ayrshire Building & Works in the black
Building & Works is the internal provider of repairs and maintenance for East Ayrshire Council, covering the council’s stock of 14,600 houses and 500 public buildings. In an area covering towns including Kilmarnock, and Cumnock, it employs a dedicated team of 306 people, generating a turnover of £18.7m.
In 1997/98 the business incurred a substantial trading deficit of approximately £1.2m. To turn things around, plans needed to be put in place to improve management information, operational procedures and financial performance.
Under the new leadership of John Walker, who became Head of Building and Works in 1999, new management structures were introduced, and trade unions, workforce and elected members engaged in helping to introduce new ways of working.
As part of the changes, the business implemented a new software solution, Servitor from RAC Software Solutions. The system, for the first time, brought together job control, job costing, materials management and a suite of key performance reports for the operational, managerial and financial sides of the business.
Servitor helped Building & Works carry out business critical analysis and job level costings, and through the use of key reports areas of the department were realigned and focused. Costs were kept down, productivity went up, surplus was generated and end users were more satisfied.
Since the introduction of Servitor, Buildings and Works has:
- Turned its £1.2m deficit in 1997/1998 into a trading surplus of £2.2m in 2004/2005
- Achieved its key performance targets of trading profitably restoring confidence
- Improved its tenant repair service by average 75% to 83% on target
- Introduced a cultural shift in the company, in which employees are more motivated, proud to work for the business and have a more commercial attitude to how they approach their work
- Competed successfully in a voluntary competitive tender for the maintenance of public buildings in 2004
Despite these strides forward, Building & Works isn’t resting on its laurels. The organisation intends to expand its use of Servitor with the introduction of new modules allowing employees to record and monitor the progress of jobs while on the move, implement automated scheduling and facilitate customer surveys and feedback on work.
“Servitor has been a crucial tool to help turn our business into a more productive, commercially astute organisation which recognises the needs of its customers and delivers ,” comments John Walker. “As we introduce mobile technology and automated scheduling we believe that our customer and employee satisfaction, and productivity levels, will rise still further.”
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