Aptean Cutting Edge CMMS Solution Case Study: NHS Forth Valley Hospital

Background

Founded in 1884 in Africa, PZ Cussons operates internationally as a supplier of consumer goods that champion the wellbeing of people, families, and communities everywhere. With their UK headquarters based in Manchester, PZ Cussons Ltd is a leading British manufacturer of personal healthcare products and consumer goods including brands like Carex, Imperial Leather, Sanctury Spa, and St. Tropez.

PZ Cussons adopted Agility CMMS in 2015 as part of their maintenance strategy to centralise their schedules and jobs and remove the need for paper documentation. Since then, various team members have been involved with the system and in more recent years, the Head of Engineering, Simon Breheny, and Engineering Leader/Maintenance Planner, Marc Bull, have been ensuring effective maintenance planning and management with Agility CMMS.

The Solution

Agility CMMS was selected to centralise all maintenance and help the organisation with their sustainability efforts in terms of using less paper. They manage several work order types including:

• Annual site wide shut down – carried out once a year for bigger maintenance tasks.

• Workshop repairs – equipment that might sit on a shelf for example and not be used all the time, but the team can pick these up as and when they have availability.

• Urgent repairs / Breakdowns – utilising the Agility helpdesk jobs are logged with the support of triage questions which help assess the issue. These jobs are then crowdsourced and sent directly to the team to pick up urgently.

• Corrective jobs – these are less urgent and sit in a backlog, they’re dealt with daily through the engineering planning meeting.

• Facilities corrective jobs – directly related to the building rather than machinery or equipment, these jobs are managed with the support of the facilities team.

• Improvement jobs – these are assessed daily through the site improvement engineer who then prioritises the jobs based on risk and cost.

As Simon shared: “With Agility CMMS everyone is more organised, and we can manage our jobs more effectively. Different jobs go to different people based on their skillset, but everyone can see what they have to work on with a task list. We can also see who has what on and how quickly the team are getting through the jobs, supporting us to manage our resources. We can effectively monitor the progress of jobs, and we can also see if jobs are being passed back to others for support, enabling us to work as a team to complete all the jobs. It also lets us allocate for interventions which we can do daily.”

Marc went on to describe: “We have dashboards around the business providing transparency as to where we are with maintenance jobs, what needs to be done, and what we have achieved. There is a screen in reception, so it is the first thing everyone sees when they come in, and it updates in 30 second intervals, displaying Work Orders, breakdowns, and more.”

Simon continued: “Agility allows us to prioritise jobs which helps us to continuously improve our response times. It might be that we have a month to complete a job as it is non-urgent, or 7-days, or 24hrs, this steer enables us to support production and be on the case with urgent jobs as quickly as possible to help avoid downtime.

All our planned maintenance is allocated with a month priority and scheduled in for the month, sometimes these get pushed and cross over into the next month. However, the Agility dashboards allow us to see where we are in terms of compliance so we can bring things forward if needed, to ensure we are always on top of it. We track all our statutory planned maintenance so things related to fire like pumps, etc., and these are carried out in weekly fire risk assessments, and we can easily pull up reports on these at any time.”

Marc followed by saying: “We can see the number of open Work Orders (WO), how many are raised in a week, and we can then allocate these to those we can see might have spare time. Everything is in Agility, everything in terms of our maintenance planning waits in Agility for the team to action it.”

Simon went onto talk about production: “Here at PZ, we don’t keep much stock on site, we have four-hour deliveries including bottles and caps, and all the teams work on a shift basis. For maintenance and production, shift teams’ management can see what everyone is doing and where any problem or impact areas might be. Handovers between shift teams used to be a massive issue with sign off sheets and taking tools off, and things, but we don’t have this issue with Agility, it gives everyone transparency.

As a team we can forward project what is coming up, it’s all in Agility, so we can think about whether we need to pull things forward or if we need to think about additional resources. It is massively helpful in terms of not just managing jobs, but also managing our labour resources.

Dashboards have made a massive difference, and the reports are great, and give us all sorts of information. For example, we have a due date performance report – we can see if a due date has been moved, did you complete it on time, or move it. Maintenance efficiency can be measured so things like we can see over 95% of scheduled jobs were completed on time. We’ve got instant visibility of outstanding PMs, and we are really pleased that we’ve been compliant with our PMs for over 4 months now which is great. Everything the engineers do is in one place and can be accessed in terms of compliance and audit data. Our completed jobs have gone through the roof, and it is a really positive stat to display on the screens around the site.

Every engineer now has a challenge to raise 10 WOs per month off a PM or a breakdown or as they are walking around. They can scan the QR code we’ve placed on all machinery and log it quickly, and it means we’re monitoring everything closely.

We have evolved our use of the system over the last 6-12months, and Agility makes life so much easier for everyone from the guys doing the jobs to us planning and managing maintenance, to reporting elsewhere in the business as to how we’re doing.”

Marc went onto mention logging jobs: “We have allocated an iPad to each line so it’s quick and easy to login to Agility and raise a request. The triage questions make it quick and simple for a job to be logged, and then it can be automatically allocated to the engineers to work telling them if it is a breakdown, corrective, improvement, or automation. Agility supports us to be more efficient and makes it so much easier for everyone to manage maintenance jobs, supporting us to ensure production lines are up and running.”

The Future

Looking to what next for the future, Simon explained: “The more we use Agility, the more we can see what it has to offer. The user day was good, and we heard what other users were doing, and we like the monthly webinars.

We now have a standard completion report with fault groups and the fault call they relate to. Once we have some more data here, we will be able to identify any ongoing issues like why does line 3 have a continual fault.

We have also made a checklist that can be signed by a shift authorised person on the DRA for things like working at height permit, this goes live next month, and not only speeds up the process but also gets ride of more paper and helps with our sustainability goals.

In addition, we are looking at how we use the Agility inventory functionality more as we know we can integrate it with SAP, and this is something PZ I.T. have agreed we can pick up next year.”

Marc concluded: “We are looking forward to further working with the SSG Insight team, our Account Manager is really good and stays in contact with us regularly, the Support guys are always on the case if we have an issue, and we’ve enjoyed working with the Consultants who are really knowledgeable.”

To find out more about how we work with PZ Cussons and other manufacturers around the world, please contact a member of our global team today.

The client

The 300m Forth Valley Royal Hospital facility in Larbert, Stirlingshire, is the largest NHS construction project ever built in Scotland and one of the most modern and well-equipped hospitals in Europe. The hospital has 860 inpatient and day beds. It will have the full range of acute hospital services, including a mental health facility and a women and children unit.

The Forth Valley Royal prides itself on its services and facilities which promise to make stays and visits as pleasant and comfortable as possible.

The need

As part of its pursuit of excellence, the Forth Valley Royal Hospital developers required an automated management system that reduced the need for manual processing, reducing paperwork and phone calls. An effective set of facilities management and maintenance processes was absolutely essential to achieve this. The core functions that needed automating included management of portering, estates, catering, security and car parking, maintenance planning, equipment and asset management, and inventory and spare parts administration.

In their business case for the new hospital, the NHS Board set out the need to segregate patient and facilities management activity. The team from international service company Serco won the facilities management contract and listened carefully to their requirements. After extensive research, the team realised that it was time for ‘robotic’ science to arrive in the UK health market.

Operating behind the scenes in specially designed tunnels and lifts, the robots at Forth Valley Royal Hospital were enlisted to help keep patient areas free of trolleys and other clutter, reduce infection risks, and free up support staff to focus on priorities for patients. Their aim was to provide a calmer environment to improve the patient experience. The solution

An effective computerised facilities management helpdesk system was key to supporting the hospital’s services and facilities. When the hospital awarded its Facilities Management contract to Serco, the company selected SSG Insight as its software partner. SSG Insight’s maintenance and facilities management software, AgilityAuto, has been implemented as part of the agreement.

SSG Insight was one of the first companies to enter into the Computerised Maintenance and Facilities Management arena and has built up a 34-year track record as specialists in delivering business focused innovation for asset and maintenance management. In addition to managing the workflow for hard and soft services throughout the hospital, the software needed to be integrated with the robotic vehicles to monitor their performance.

AgilityAuto is being used to allocate and dispatch porters, take food orders at the bedside, and manage a wide range of services, including reception, estates maintenance, security, and cleaning. The software also monitors the robots, generating performance management statistics as part of an automated system which flags an alert should the robots not deliver on time.

The benefits

Core functionality of the facilities management software includes maintenance planning, equipment and asset management, and inventory and spare parts administration. AgilityAuto also offers helpdesk and work request functionality, which allows people throughout the organisation to log and monitor their maintenance requests. A visual drag and drop scheduler enable effective work order management, employee allocation, and resourcing. The AgilityAuto helpdesk screens have been configured to ensure that every job is quickly and efficiently allocated to the correct performance management standard by answering a maximum of five simple questions presented in dropdown lists. Response and rectification times for every job are automatically set using the service level agreement details stored in the system and service managers are presented with a series of dashboard indicators that automatically show the current status of all work using colours, charts, and visual alarms to make sure service commitments are met.

David Hipkin, SSG Insight’s Managing Director, said, “When SSG Insight joined the Forth Valley project the hospital robots already existed but how they would interact with the hospital’s bigger management systems was not clear – it was uncharted territory. SSG Insight’s engineers went in and made the technology work within months of the commission – an exceptional achievement in healthcare IT implementation.”

Next steps

In its first three months, more than 100,000 meals have been ordered and successfully delivered. The next steps for the system will involve the rollout of location-based deployment using an interface with the WIFI system provided by CISCO, which will ensure that porters and maintenance engineers are automatically assigned jobs efficiently according to both their skills and their current location as they move around the hospital using their PDA.