FMJ Facilities Management magazine providing industry-specific intelligence to FM and property professionals
Queensway has appointed Expansive FM as its CAFM partner to help power the growth of its Starbucks and KFC franchises in the UK, Austria and Slovakia.
Queensway is a hospitality group managing major hotel, coffee house and restaurant brands across Europe and East Africa. It operates 21 Starbucks shops in the UK and 19 KFC restaurants in Austria and Slovakia, with an ambitious plan to add 15 new outlets every year across these regions.
According to Queensway the Expansive solution is vital to Queensway’s growth plans across Europe, adding the digital transformation of its FM operations will improve customer service, efficiency and cost control, as well as liberating the whole team to concentrate on strategic growth.
In early 2022 Head of Operations for Queensway Coffee Houses, Shakeel Jivraj began looking for a CAFM to streamline its Starbucks operations at its UK outlets. He explained: “We were running FM in our business using spreadsheets and email. A lot of data and knowledge was stored in the heads of our teams. We were distracted by the constant manual admin of reactive and preventive maintenance. We needed to digitise and automate to save time and money.”
Meanwhile, Head of Operations for KFC, Heike Thalhofer was experiencing the same issues in Austria and Slovakia. She said: “We were at the limit of what we could handle manually. We needed a digital solution to give us full transparency of our FM operations. We needed to automate our processes to meet all our brand standards while controlling costs.”
Expansive was appointed as the “right solution” for both teams following a competitive tender process. Jivraj said: “Expansive was the only software partner who could support the European coverage we needed with a powerful platform that operates in multiple languages, currencies and across different time zones.”
Expansive will deliver new efficiencies, which for the first time will allow the Queensway teams to have digital control over their helpdesks, work order management, PPM and compliance, and budgetary oversight, and which Jivraj points out will drive better decision-making.
He said: “The CAFM will empower our people on the ground, showing them what they are spending and helping them solve problems more quickly and effectively. This is important because FM is a massive part of P&L in our business. Giving our workers the digital tools to work smarter will contribute to cost savings, profitability and drive growth.”
Jivraj also adds that Queensway’s vendors welcome CAFM: “Our vendors are also excited because they can see the efficiencies both parties will gain from automation. With improved communications, they will be able to diagnose problems remotely, improve their first-time fix rates and minimise downtime.”
Expansive plans to rapidly mobilise its CAFM. Joshua Griebach, CEO of Expansive Solutions, commented: “Expansive work in a very agile way, and Queensway have been extremely engaged with the process. The solution will be in place by the end of October. That’s an eight-week mobilisation, designed to help them scale faster and support their long-term growth plans:”
While some personnel are finally returning to the office – the great majority of organisations (up to 83 per cent) anticipate a hybrid mix of on-premises and working from home to continue for the foreseeable future.
This means that when it comes to providing access to the workplace, where once it was simply enough to maintain a welcoming reception for visitors, organisations today must also keep a close eye on access permissions in real-time to keep buildings safe and secure while ensuring they comply with compliance.
Pitney Bowes Smart Access Management in association with FMJ has produced a new White Paper which explains how to create a welcoming, actively managed environment for authorised people.
It explains how new Smart Access Management™ (SAM) delivers a complete, real-time and data-driven view of all your people, visitors and contractors, to help give you greater control and visibility.
To download the white paper click here.
