An exciting new contract in a key sector

Q3 Services is delighted to announce a new partnership with one of the Midlands’ largest blue-light contracts, following a competitive tender process.

The company will be providing cleaning, environmental, and soft services to over 30 sites across the force’s area in a 3 year-plus 2 contract, valued in excess of £650,000 per annum.

Over 60 staff will TUPE across as part of the mobilisation and we look forward to welcoming these new colleagues into the Q3 family.

Commenting on this significant success, CEO Martyn Freeman said, “These are exciting times for Q3 Services. The new contract demonstrates our ability to convince potential clients of the value of our Quality Service-People-Clients proposition and strengthens our presence in the Midlands area”.

Providing reassurance to our clients that our IT is secure

In recent weeks, Q3 has been working with partners Active Workspace and CS Risk Management to complete the final stage of the Cyber Essentials accreditation – Cyber Essentials Plus.

Following the good news of the initial accreditation back in October, the final phase involved significant third-party auditing of all the company’s relevant processes and procedures.

The Government instigated the Cyber Essentials scheme in 2014 to provide SMEs with a framework that organisations could use to protect themselves against common online security threats.

This accreditation covers the Q3 Services, Lotus Landscapes and Q3 Services (CI) Ltd businesses.

This is a great achievement for the Q3 business, providing peace of mind in our day-to-day activities and online interaction with our clients.

A new business rolled out during a lockdown and over a Christmas period!

Q3 Services Group has announced that it has expanded its range of self-delivered services to include security.

The company has created its security division as a limited company within the Group. In a short space over the Christmas period and during lockdown, Q3 has mobilised a major contract with a retail shopping centre in Barnsley. The company has already established a wealth of security guard and manned-guarding expertise and is now capable of delivering a complete security service, on a national basis to both Blue Chip and Public Sector customers.

The company is embedding the same “boutique” is beautiful philosophy and successful management techniques to this area of service delivery, as it has in other areas of its operations. Underpinning this approach will be the organisation’s core Q3 Values of Quality Service, Quality People, Quality Clients.

Initially, Manned Guarding will be at the forefront of the company’s new Security Services operation, but the company plans to complement this with innovative technology developed with its technology partners, to create bespoke solutions, designed to protect businesses in every sector. The use of technology to optimise and drive operational excellence, is a model that has already proven successful within Q3’s cleaning business.

Commenting on the new move, CEO Martyn Freeman said, “During the pandemic, both cleaning and security service lines have taken on an even greater importance in ensuring the smooth, continuation of “business as usual” for many clients. Our simple aim with our extension into security, is to deliver service excellence, at competitive rates, 24/7 and 365. We know that’s the winning formula for happy customers.”

Martyn Freeman muses on the trends in outsourcing

A few of us are old enough to remember the early Thatcher years and the awakening of privatisation and outsourcing. In 1981, Southend Council outsourced its refuse collection service to Exclusive Cleaning Ltd, who despite making “outrageous profits” managed to save the council over £0.5 million in the first twelve months. Apparently, over 100 authorities applied to Southend for their contract blueprint!

Two years later, came the privatisation of hospital services, when hospitals were required by HC(83)18 to put cleaning, laundry and catering services out to competitive tender. A queue of “contract cleaners” formed to chase down these lucrative contracts, including some long-forgotten names like Exclusive, Crothall’s, Home Counties Cleaning, and a few others who are still with us.

Now, almost forty years later, the public sector appears to be going full circle (as so often happens in our industry). In a speech last year boldly titled, “The Future of Healthcare”, Matt Hancock promised to “bust” bureaucracy, empower leadership and build trust. A leaked white paper indicates that there is a concerted effort to undo David Cameron’s strategy for more competition in the Healthcare sector and, perhaps driven by the success of the vaccine roll-out and the failure of many of the outsourced Covid19 programmes, we are experiencing an “about-face”.

The NHS is recovering its appetite for provision of in-house services. NHS Property Services is leading the charge with a declared strategy to “deliver our core services to our customers through in-house teams where possible”. But this is easier said than done, after all this time. In many NHS Trusts, there is no history, experience, or expertise for managing, mobilising, and deploying cleaning services, at scale, and in such critical environments.

Where can they turn for help? The outsourcers have no interest in supporting the process of insourcing, being philosophically and diametrically opposed to the whole concept. What the NHS needs right now is an organisation, or group of individuals, who understand, and are sympathetic to the reforms, and can help bring the strategy to fruition. They certainly don’t want one or other version of the truth, or a particular type of delivery model thrust on them.

In an earlier life in the FM industry, a few colleagues and I conceptualised a new approach that might just work for the NHS in its current predicament. Designed to promote best practice and deliver best value, the solution focused on integrating innovation, quality of service, use of technology and compliance, without the need for full outsourcing. It was an exciting proposition that never finally made it to market, but that’s another story.

The NHS does not need to be wedded to one model, or swing from one extreme to the other. They just need to think differently and do things differently, but they can’t do it alone. FM (private) sector expertise does exist with the knowledge to both lead and support the transformation, without conflict of interest. It is possible to outsource the management without outsourcing the staff. And that doesn’t necessarily mean consultancy. Heaven forbid that we go down that route and let the likes of KPMG, EY and others charge exorbitant fees for something they know little about. The FM sector is here and willing with the resource to help, and the NHS should be neither nervous nor afraid to ask for it.

Alex Gavrilovic shares his views on robots in the cleaning industry

There’s a website called will robots take my job.com. On this website you can enter virtually any job and the website will assess, as a percentage, the likelihood of that role being taken over by a robot. So, just for fun we typed in “cleaner” and once it had qualified that this meant janitors and cleaners, (excluding maids and domestic housekeeping cleaners), the algorithm spat out the answer 67%.

That’s a quite scarily high number, but is it realistic? Q3 is at the forefront of using “tech” in delivery of commercial cleaning and FM services, so we asked Alex Gavrilovic Q3’s Solutions Director for his opinion. Alex has worked in the cleaning industry for some 25 years and is currently involved with deploying robots on a few of Q3’s contracts, so he knows a thing or two about this.

Alex explained, “Right now, robots are being used in two main areas, carpet vacuuming and wash-scrub-dry operations on hard-floors. In both cases, they really come into their own on large areas of flooring. So, deciding when and where to use robots, is very much reliant on our knowledge of the space and our experience and expertise of the ROI and productivity the machines will deliver in that space. We need to factor in the expanse and complexity of the area in which the robot will operate and the client’s specification, including frequency of cleaning.

“These ROI calculations have changed quite recently because like so much new technology, the cost of the robots has dropped significantly since they first arrived on the scene and leasing deals are available to avoid large-up front capital outlay. Productivity has also improved many-fold because of technical improvements in the equipment, such as speed and battery life.
“The hard surface cleaning robot machines are ideal for expansive areas such as airports, hospital corridors, distribution centres and shopping centres. They even come with cameras and sensors now and some models can talk to customers in a variety of languages. This really provides a “Wow!” factor in places like malls and airports, adding to the customer experience and reinforcing the perception of being in a place where people care.

“Of course, there’s also one more very important you simply cannot forget when deploying robots and that’s the human element. Robots are not yet truly autonomous, and the reality is that the robot is complementing the work of a human being in virtually every situation. There still needs to be a person there to undertake basic checks on the robot at the start of the shift, such as brushes, water levels etc and to take it to the start point. Humans also have to map the area in which the robot is operating and remap it if there are layout changes – which is inevitable in most operational situations. This means that right now, we are investing a lot into new training programmes to upskill many of our cleaners to become robot operators and technicians on major contracts.

“In reality, on a typical contract, the robot will still only be carrying out about a third of the cleaning activity with more complex areas such as washrooms and offices still being undertaken by humans. It’s true that you can get higher quality and greater consistency with robots and there certainly aren’t the number of HR issues, but that’s not the main consideration.”

As Alex has explained, there are upsides and downsides to using robots in commercial cleaning and the decision to use them is not straightforward. The cleaning company needs to make an informed judgment on when and when not to call on robot technology, which means that they aren’t going to completely take over the cleaning world anytime soon. Indeed, it will probably be a long time before they even attain the 67% figure predicted by willrobotstakemyjob.com.

Ironically, the same innovative, technology we currently see in robots makes them brilliant in some situations and yet almost useless in others. I expect that just like the Daleks, they will eventually crack the problem of going up stairs and then we’ll all be looking over our shoulder?