In December last year, Amey was contracted by the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) to deliver facilities management and project work at five United States Visiting Forces (USVF) locations across the UK.
The contract includes the provision of reactive maintenance, statutory and mandatory compliance tasks and additional works services at RAF Alconbury, Molesworth, Croughton, Fairford and other satellite sites, along with the management of approximately 350 Service Family Accommodation (SFA) homes.
Since then, following a very quick and short mobilisation period, both organisations have been working together to ensure that essential services at the USVF sites continues seamlessly and without interruption to the Service personnel and families. DIO and Amey have a long history of collaborative working, both recently achieving the ISO 440001 collaborative working standard, and they have been busy putting these skills to the test in order to improve service delivery.
The story so far
- Around 130 staff have successfully TUPE’d into the Amey business and the supply chain, providing reassurance to those who felt they were facing an uncertain future
- We have welcomed 14 new people into key roles across the contract and continue to focus our efforts on recruiting the right people into the right roles
- Amey’s trusted supply chain partners, MMS and Daubney, who were already providing their services in our Regional Prime Central contract, have taken the opportunity to expand their service delivery into USVF, enabling them to utilise their vast knowledge and skillset to provide a professional service
- A deep-dive audit has been conducted across all sites to identify the key areas of focus, to ensure compliancy across the estate, so we can implement an effective action plan
- Our award winning customer service centre is now providing 24/7 support to USVF, dealing with all issues including complaints, property and building management
- We’ve aligned our processes and procedures to ensure Amey’s strong health and safety culture is embedded throughout USVF
- The proven application used in our Next Generation Estates Contracts (NGEC) is being used to record tasks and report on compliance to ensure a standard approach across all our Defence contracts.
Already we can see that the relationship with our end users is improving and Amey’s USVF Account Manager, Paul Callear, credits this to the huge effort that’s been put into supporting our people through the mobilisation, to deliver in areas of safety, performance and compliance in line with both DIO and USVF requirements.
Paul is confident that these improvements will enable us to deliver real value for money in Defence and said: “It’s certainly been a challenge but we’re beginning to see signs of a more efficient and effective service. Generally the feeling from our end users is that we’re slowly but surely bringing the contract to a better place and this has been down to the collaborative working practices of all parties.
“Regular engagement has been implemented across each management level and we are inspiring our new employees to live and breathe Amey values. It was heartening to hear about our teams organising a drive past for a local Major’s son earlier this month. He wasn’t able to have his birthday party so it was recognised by the ‘honking’ of horns outside his home. The Major was delighted and expressed his sincere thanks for brightening up his son’s day. It’s moments like this that reassures us that we are heading in the right direction.”