The Facilities Management team at British American Tobacco (BAT) has long had a reputation for seeking out and achieving best practice in their FM operation. Following on from their involvement in Advanced Workplace Associates? Workplace Best Practice Group, BAT wished to develop a structure for assessing their operation against best practice.
Building on our work in developing best practice Advanced Workplace Associates (AWA) were appointed to create a comprehensive tool kit for BAT to allow them to regularly assess the degree to which their Facilities Management operation conformed to best practice.
The tool kit covered the management of topics such as cleaning, catering, maintenance, energy, space security and reception. For each topic the following were assessed:
- Visibility of a clear strategy and linkage to business need
- Client relationship management
- Change management
- Problem management
- Resource management
- Performance management
- Training and development.
AWA subsequently went on to provide a full assessment of BAT?s FM operation in London, providing recommendations to bring the management of the activity in line with best practice and BAT undertook to implement these.
As a further aspect of developing their Facilities Management capabilities by learning from the best, BAT commissioned AWA to carry out research into the developments in FM service provision in Europe. This research involved direct interviews and visits to large multinational organisations in:
- France
- Holland
- Germany
- Sweden
The results of this work are now available to others from AWA, via our report 'European Facilities Management Practices'. (Further details are available upon request.)
British American Tobacco has a desire to make best practices and advantages of their learning to other companies within their corporate group.
