Pickerings Lifts currently holds the Whitbread Group Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM) ‘Contractor of the Year’ Award. In its context a prestigious award - and without doubt great for Pickerings and Whitbread - but what is the relevance of this accolade in the broader commercial environment? The answer, in short, is more than might be apparent at first glance.

Whitbread is typical of large businesses across many sectors, from banking to manufacturing to retail. It is an extremely diverse group, changing rapidly in response to increasing market pressures.

The businesses include Brewers Fayre, Beefeater, Costa Coffee, TGI Friday and Travel Inn chains – each with differing needs as a result of operating in different markets, at different times of the day and with very different demographic profiles.

Yet common to all is that they are dynamic, fast-turnaround businesses who cannot afford interruptions to service due to lift breakdowns. As a result Pickerings has to be equally flexible and responsive in meeting the requirements of the business.

Pickerings provides full maintenance support for each operating division’s complete stock of passenger, goods, service and DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) lifts, with a nationwide network of professional engineers providing rapid-response, round-the-clock support.

The role of service support

Scratch below the surface and many claims of ‘superior’ or ‘unrivalled’ service offer little or no more true differentiation than the products they support. In other words, it is more a case of lip service rather than customer service.

In many industries, the demand for goods, service and passenger lifts comes increasingly from organisations with multiple outlets – from hotel and leisure chains to nursing homes and manufacturing groups –that are characterised by having sophisticated and demanding buying policies.

In terms of product, their requirements are frequently similar in that lifts must be price-competitive, of superior quality and highly robust. As such, in the buyer’s mind, they fall into the category of ‘fit and forget’ purchases.

However, it is in the crucial area of product support that customer demands tend to be more specialised. Of course, reliability is always important to a degree, but in many cases it is all-important.

For peace of mind and to ensure business continuity, access to a truly national or regional network of service engineers becomes critical. Just as a business will service its vehicle fleet regularly to ensure it stays on the road, so servicing a goods or passenger lift will ensure it does not let the business down. And, similarly, as each vehicle will have different servicing requirements, so lift service providers need a thorough technical understanding of the differing demands of both manufacturers and lift types.

Problems may arise, of course, through no fault of the equipment itself, through power cuts, spillages or vandalism, for example. At this point, a 24 hour, 365 day service with rapid response time is needed: after all, whether you are operating a pub restaurant on a Friday night, a high volume production process or a hospital laundry, getting professional help on-site quickly is critical, both to you and your customers or clients.

And similar problems may arise simply through heavy use or misuse by staff who may be unaware of how to use the lifts properly.

In order for such a support service to be truly effective however, not only must the engineers be of high quality and trained on all major manufacturers’ products, but they must be backed up with a rapid parts and replacement equipment delivery service.

The level of support can impact on the business in a number of different ways. In customer-facing parts of the business, such as a hotel or restaurant lobby, a lift which has been vandalised or is simply shabby will reflect poorly on the business as a whole.

Similarly, behind the scenes, if a hotel laundry or restaurant service lift stops working, this will present problems both in terms of reduced customer service and pressure on staff, as well as increasing potential health and safety risks.

Any repair is by its very nature inconvenient to the business and so flexibility is needed on the part of the service provider, who should work with the client to minimise the level of disruption caused by an emergency repair. Often, routine maintenance should be planned either out-of-hours or at a time when the level of activity at the premises is low.

Though individual businesses may devolve varying levels of purchasing responsibility to a local or branch level, the benefits of centralisation with a nationally-based lift maintenance supplier are considerable. These include consistent and controllable quality and the economies of scale and convenience which come from having one point of contact, one invoicing system and one management accounting system.

Good service today is much more broadly defined, to include back-office functions. It is likely to include, for example, the ability to offer compatible systems and reporting: equally, performance is more likely to be measured against KPIs relating to response times, lift downtimes and so on.

Operators of any premises also need advice and support on a range of regulatory issues, relating to both employees and members of the public using the facilities. Both the Part M Building Regulations and Health & Safety at Work legislation make specific reference to the provision and operation of lifts as part of their broader remit to ensure a safe environment in which to work and to visit.

And, in an increasingly competitive age where looking after the customer has moved centre stage in the drive for service differentiation, help is also required to ensure there are no barriers to access, both to and within the building.

Building access has gained a higher profile in light of the Disability Discrimination Act, but the need is much broader, for it is as important for a sports or health club, restaurant or office to provide easy access for a young mum with a baby buggy as it is to someone with, say, a physical impairment.

Reliability versus price

In 2005, Pickerings Lifts undertook a major survey of 350 companies to identify what end-users wanted from lift service providers. In choosing a maintenance and repair company, reliability came top of the list, ahead of price and good communications – knowing when the engineer will turn up, being told the nature of the problem and when it can be fixed.

Interestingly, when asked where current suppliers fall down most in terms of service quality, the same three criteria headed the list, with a failure to complete the service or repair rapidly and correctly ahead of poor value for money and a general lack of information on what was being done.

Two aspects of service quality emerged especially strongly in the survey. Firstly, that the personal relationship between the individual engineer and the end-user is of key importance: and, secondly, that there is a lack of consistency across the country – another case, perhaps, of ‘postcode lottery’ in service delivery.

There is no doubt that the provision of maintenance services is often highly competitive. Yet as the Pickerings study has shown, businesses have increasingly realised that accepting the cheapest service quote can often result in inferior service, to the detriment of the business overall. In choosing a maintenance provider therefore, any value equation must include reliability and responsiveness as well as cost.

The result of any high quality planned preventative maintenance programme is that the lift stock will run consistently trouble-free more of the time, with costly downtimes minimised. After all, as Whitbread will testify, it’s not just the managers of Travel Inns who want to sleep easy in their beds.

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