The client
Whitbread PLC is the UK’s largest hotel, restaurant and coffee shop operator with over 43,000 employees.
They are passionate about customer service and their major brands include Premier Inn, Costa Coffee, Beefeater Grill and Brewers Fayre.
The challenge
Astral won a tender in 2012 to supply maintenance and emergency service to a number of Whitbread operational zones covering over 430 properties across the central region of the UK.
The disciplines included fire alarms and emergency lighting, with added responsibility of providing quotations and installations anywhere in the UK when required.
An added challenge was that most of the client’s fire alarm systems use a proprietary or ‘closed’ protocol, which meant that Astral had to be able to service the system down to programming level, and within the KPIs set.
The one-stop-shop
Astral’s team of trained engineers were skilled and ready to take on the closed protocol challenge and, with the client’s help, obtained copies of the relevant software for the variety of the panels in situ.
Almost from the start the Astral team also became involved in the client’s emergency light remedial programme as well as testing.
Astral created an enhanced asset list library of the various fitting types on sites, with photographs to assist in recognition. In addition Astral provided a surveyor to visit any sites with issues, and to produce quotations for the replacement of equipment which failed the testing.
It became quickly apparent that more detailed asset information on the type of systems Astral was servicing was required to provide comfort to the client that all individual assets were being serviced, especially in the hotels.
Astral proposed a solution involving Astral’s Service Management System (SMS) which would, over a twelve month period, create a full asset register for Whitbread PLCs systems, that will also provide confirmation of individual assets serviced on each visit.
