Our Operational outcomes during Covid 19
Bellrock have over 1100 directly employed staff, 1000 customers and 1000 supplier chain partners, managing over 175,000 sites and well over £1bn in annual spend. Operationally we are based at over 40 locations around the UK and we have some 175 engineers and over 100 RICS qualified surveyors working location independent around the country.
When Covid-19 landed, it proved itself to be a logistical nightmare and let us to change our ways of working and keep our customer’s businesses running smoothly.
Structural Management
From the onset, our Board set up a Covid-19 pandemic response team, which covers all aspects of the business and all key decision making. Meeting daily, it deals with all matters of safety, employee policy, communications, IT and operational service. In addition, our main Board has met weekly to consider health and safety, resourcing, liquidity, strategy and now, return to work.
IT
All our operational business runs on Concerto, our in house owned estate management suite. Concerto has always been capable of running remotely, best evidenced by the fact that very early on, our entire Concerto business was able to work from home.
Today our WCS, M&E and TRE divisions are all running activity for our customers remotely.
More widely, our use of Office 365 has enabled us to very quickly close all non-operational sites and move to the working from home model we are now adopting. Each of our home workers stay in contact through Teams and SharePoint to maximise our working time away from the office.
FMIC
Our contact centre for planned and reactive maintenance teams and related support of which are based in Leicester and India, have successfully been moved into a home working model. All jobs still route through the normal FixMy applications, calls and emails, but with the use of home installed Cisco routing, we are now able to cover 24/7/365 support from home.
At this point job volumes have now stabilised, and the new Covid-19 patterns are being coped with easily.
Finance
Finance systems are also cloud-based, enabling us to migrate staff quickly to working from home. Our normal management accounts, billing, credit control, accounts payable and treasury functions are all performing as normal.
Supply Chain
Our supply chain team have been incredibly busy, supporting partners with projected work levels, encouraging continued operation to support critical key worker activities, and making sure payments can be made as fast as possible to support supplier’s liquidity as best as we can.
Work is now ongoing to look at which suppliers can best support our customers move from lockdown to gradual reopening.
Engineers
Our engineering activities are very much open for business where it is safe and appropriate to do so. Most of our current work is directly in support of the emergency effort or maintaining buildings to the minimum level of safety needed for a safe return to work. Focus upon revised RAMS, extra PPE as needed and mental well-being have been at the forefront of our efforts.
Surveyors
Our fire risk, water risk and condition survey teams can only carry out their tasks on site. Again, we are very heavily focussed upon key worker sectors, where over the last few years we have surveyed some 70% of the NHS trusts across the country.
Indirectly our staff are also continuing to advise on construction design and project work for programmes that will start up later in the year, once safe to do so.
Sales and Marketing
Many of our current and potential customers are now using the time working from home to start launching market testing or full-scale procurement activities. Our sales team are flat out supporting early thinking about how to shape the estate risk management needs of the years ahead in a post Covid-19 world.
Marketing have launched the new Covid-19 response site which enables us to share our thoughts on how you can weather the storm and come out on the other side.
HR
Our HR team have had two key focuses during this period. They have tirelessly been working on daily communications designed to improve employee wellbeing, keeping us connected and providing support for those colleagues who, from time to time, have inevitably struggled.
Secondly, they have helped us work our way through the ever-changing government advice around furlough. Whilst we have done everything possible to keep operating normally, we still placed approximately 25% of our colleagues into furlough. Taking them through the process and making sure they stay connected with everything and everyone at Bellrock has been a major task.
Covid Secure Workplace Certificate
The UK Government requires all businesses to carry out a Covid-19 risk assessment and to put in place appropriate actions to manage the risks identified. We confirm that we have been pro-active at assessing risk and making changes to our work processes to ensure that our staff are able to work safely and with confidence. Our Staying Covid-19 Secure certificate can be found here.
How can Bellrock help you?
If any of our own processes and approaches would be useful for you during the crisis, please contact us, as we would be more than happy to share.
