Leapfrog Day Nurseries - Leaping into action
“Using QFM gives us a more professional approach when dealing with contractors. We are able to provide them with the necessary information more efficiently and we can measure their performance on a regular basis.”
Leapfrog Day Nurseries is one of the UK’s largest childcare providers, with a total of 102 Day Nurseries offering almost 10,000 places for children aged 0-5 years. Its large and varied building portfolio, from nurseries through to the company’s headquarters in Burton upon Trent, presents a complex challenge for the facilities management team. Heading up the team is Barry Yeomans who was appointed in January 2005 and tasked with finding an IT application that was able to bring together the facilities management function for all of Leapfrog’s nurseries across the UK.
Leapfrog’s recent merge with three other well known nursery brands, Jigsaw, Princess Christian and Petit Enfant meant that a centralised system that could co-ordinate all of the nurseries was essential. Yeomans explains, “The main issue was that we had four different companies each of which had different ways of doing things - four different cultures if you like. We needed a solution that would allow us to unify the management across all of the nurseries.”
Documentray Evidence
As part of the overall facilities strategy Yeomans immediately saw the benefits that a Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) could bring to the company and as a result implemented a system across all of the 102 nurseries. “We chose to bring in CAFM software because we needed a system that could provide documentary evidence of where problems exist and to pre-empt where they are likely to occur.”
Leapfrog employs four technicians who cover duties on a regional remit, plus a number of specialist contractors who they work with throughout the UK. The system has greatly improved communications between the central office and the 102 nurseries. Additionally turnaround times and admin have been reduced. “Using QFM gives us a more professional approach when dealing with contractors. We are able to provide them with the necessary information more efficiently and we can measure their performance on a regular basis,” says Yeomans.
Making Improvements
The system has allowed the facilities management function to become proactive rather than reactive, by creating an audit trail that monitors jobs from the time that they are reported right through to completion. “The measurement function is important to us because it allows us to quickly identify areas of spend which we can subsequently investigate and find a reason for. The system identifies weaknesses and strengths and shows us where we need to make improvements and can even highlight user error.” The CAFM system can produce reports for the eight regional areas the nurseries are divided up into, by individual nursery or job type. Reports can then be used to identify where problems are occurring on a regular basis. “The ability to produce reports quickly is extremely beneficial. The reports highlight large areas of nursery spend,” says Yeomans.
“QFM software has been well received throughout the company, and has become an integral part of the work culture. Once staff have been shown how the software works they seem to enjoy using it. It has become something of a catchphrase, when something goes wrong staff know to ‘QFM it’.”