The first shop opened in London 21 years ago with a commitment to offering what the founders described as proper sandwiches, using only natural, preservative-free ingredients. Today it is a £180 million turnover business. 

There are no sell by dates on Pret A Manger's sandwiches and salads for one very simple reason; at the end of each day what is unsold is offered to charities.  Of course, refrigeration plays a key role in delivering this freshness.  Food hygiene and safety legislation aside, freshness is one of the main factors that keeps the customers coming back, and away from competitors' counters.  The same can be said for the air conditioning; eating lunch or enjoying a quick coffee in comfortable surroundings is an important part of the Pret experience.

Pret isn't one of those top-heavy organisations - the company, based in London's Victoria, even dislikes the use of the term "head office" - preferring, successfully as it happens, to focus its attention on food and beverage.  So much so that it decided it needed to rethink the outsourcing of the maintenance of its air conditioning and refrigeration equipment.  While this had previously been undertaken by contractors, the performance fell far short of Pret A Manger's demanding standards.  There was an unacceptable backlog of repairs, no meaningful register of equipment, and no real endeavour to get on top of planned maintenance.  Certainly there was no way in which maintenance information was used to select the most reliable and cost-effective equipment for new and refurbished shops.

A fresh approach

Pret decided that it had to adopt a more professional, holistic approach to its shop equipment maintenance.  It needed to be in a place where, first and foremost, the company could be confident that food hygiene standards were never compromised and that an acceptable level of customer comfort was consistently delivered.  More than that it was determined to have faults rectified promptly, to put an end to shop closures resulting from defective refrigeration equipment, to gain valuable feedback on the performance of the equipment it was selecting for its shops, and to place maintenance on a firm and cost-effective footing. 

It was apparent from its previous experience that this was going to call for the appointment of a maintenance provider that operated on a very different platform from contractors that Pret had previously used.  Along with several other potential maintenance service providers, north London-based M J Quinn Integrated Services was asked to tender because of its reputation for successfully providing managed planned preventative maintenance for complex multi-site operations. 

The company's bid focused heavily on three core activities: providing the essential skills and resources; utilising its proven IT infrastructure and reporting mechanisms; and professionally managing both Pret's reactive service requirements and its planned preventative maintenance.  Now, as part of a three-year term maintenance contract with Pret, M J Quinn has eliminated the outstanding fault calls record it inherited, slashed response times, and streamlined the entire shop network maintenance regime.  Into the bargain, M J Quinn has also provided Pret with a comprehensive, accurate and regularly updated register of its refrigeration and air conditioning assets, reduced costs, and for the first time empowered Pret to make real in-use value judgements on the equipment it is using.

A bespoke solution

While getting troops on the ground was an obvious priority, an immediate start was also made on establishing better long-term maintenance protocols.  A small number of select engineers and just one manager were taken on board from the previous maintenance service provider; M J Quinn established a dedicated Pret A Manger 24/7 service call desk, which operates as the central point of contact for all maintenance issues; and its specially-enhanced, computer-based planning software, Qu-Trak, was brought into play, which had been successfully used on a number of other major planned preventative maintenance contracts. 

When M J Quinn took over responsibility for Pret's maintenance in January of last year, the average number of fault calls at any one time hovered around the 60 mark; a wholly unacceptable figure, particularly in relation to there being, at the time, only 150 shops!  Within nine months, M J Quinn had reduced this to ten, during the hottest summer in recent history.  Prior to switching to M J Quinn, Pret lost over £500,000 a year through having to close shops due to faulty equipment and, while figures are not yet available for the first year of M J Quinn's contract, just one shop has had to be closed because of air conditioning malfunction.

To achieve this performance, M J Quinn located fully equipped service engineers around the country to provide Pret shops with a four-hour maximum call out for what are deemed Priority One call-outs. This is the  category into which the vast majority of call outs fall; call out time for Priority Two events is longer and, invariably, the extended timescale is caused by shop landlord delays.  All of the M J Quinn service vans are tracked remotely to ensure that the nearest can be diverted to a breakdown, so minimising the all-important response time, and audited stocks of replacement parts are carried in each vehicle.

Understandably, planned preventative maintenance cannot be carried out during normal opening hours without disrupting business and inconveniencing customers.  So, M J Quinn's solution is to undertake the quarterly planned preventative maintenance work out of hours.  This is made possible by M J Quinn's strict policy of directly employing all of its service personnel - however remote the shop location - having security clearance on all employees, and providing each service engineer with the keys to the premises for which he is responsible. 

Pret A Manger shops vary considerably in size and, originally, Pret had only limited information on what equipment was in which shop.  Furthermore, it had no meaningful service records on any particular make of equipment, or any particular piece of equipment.  In the past, this had led to repairing pieces of equipment well beyond their cost-effective life; sometimes, the same repair was carried out on a piece of equipment time and time again.  M J Quinn now uniquely numbers each piece of equipment and logs this, along with its location and service record on the Qu-Trak programme.  This provides Pret with invaluable trend analysis information on equipment performance, and M J Quinn with the ability to forecast replacement part stock levels and their distribution throughout the country.

Engineers' call reports are also logged on Qu-Trak, along with call-out response times and service details.  This has enabled M J Quinn to establish a number of KPIs - Key Performance Indicators - that are reviewed every month with Pret A Manger. 

This degree of sophistication has enabled M J Quinn to provide evidence-backed recommendations for sustainable equipment replacement and upgrades.  So much so that the company is now also involved in snagging new equipment installed in the 20 or so new shops opened every year, and replacing equipment in existing outlets.  The information stored and analysed on the Qu-Trak programme is also helping Pret to review the carbon footprint of its air conditioning equipment, with a view to cutting carbon emissions.

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