CASE STUDY: Sodexo

Sodexo’s Compliance Performance Index tool is boosting building safety by giving clients real-time visibility of their compliance status.

Sodexo Government delivers facilities management and professional property services to some of the largest UK public sector bodies. Safety is a core concern for its clients, whose property teams are responsible for hundreds of buildings and tens of thousands of assets subject to a range of statutory and mandatory maintenance tasks.

A common approach for critical compliance tasks, such as those relating to fire, gas, water and electrical maintenance, is to schedule them in CAFM systems and track completion, including any subsequent remedial works. The final, essential element is where a Sodexo or supplier engineer confirms completion and provides accurate and complete documentation to evidence compliance.

However, for large or complex estates that complete numerous tasks each week, it becomes impossible to verify the accuracy of this information manually. Where inspections may have been completed subject to remedial works, this leaves potentially high-risk gaps in both safety and compliance. Ad-hoc audits offer some assurance that work has been completed, but they are limited snapshots of compliance status.

To solve this problem, Sodexo Government worked with the SME, Premonition Software, to leverage their document analysis technology and create the Compliance Performance Index (CPI). This automation tool works alongside CAFM systems to analyse the text content of compliance-related documentation and verify the data. It understands an array of statutory evidence and triggers alerts where anything is missing, incomplete or incorrect, for example empty fields, data errors or blank documents and certificates. This then enables targeted action at the points of highest risk.

After developing an initial prototype for a large government estate, the CPI was deployed to other client organisations at the end of 2022. These clients now have a real-time, end-to-end picture of maintenance compliance across large portfolios with thousands of assets.

The user experience has been significantly enhanced by replacing the static, incomplete data available from previous systems and audits with the CPI’s live, drillable dashboards. They provide an at-a-glance view of compliance status and can be filtered by building, inspection type, asset type or trade/supplier, enabling instant review of the data behind any issues. With future due dates created automatically and work orders tracked to completion, it creates a ‘golden thread’ between planned tasks, remedial actions and demonstrable compliance.

As well as added assurance, the CPI also drives value for money. It enables assurance resources to be focused on the areas of highest risk and allows tighter monitoring of supply chain performance. The CPI has already been developed to respond to legislative, best practice and industry requirements and can continue to be enhanced as requirements change, helping to future-proof activity.

By automating verification of critical compliance data and making it available in real time, Sodexo’s CPI provides much-needed assurance for organisations with large or complex estates.

 

-Ends-