Mace Group

National refurbishment, on time and on budget

When Spanish bank Santander took over the Abbey network in the UK, it needed to rebrand and refurbish all the high-street branches with the new Santander/Abbey brand and external livery. Abbey's property team wanted a partner to deliver these objectives within extremely tight parameters and following a rigorous selection process, Mace Retail was selected.

Mace Retail delivered some outstanding results. The first 120 branches were completed in just six months and over a three year programme 720 branches were refurbished to an extremely high specification. And, as had been promised by Mace at the initial presentation, the whole programme was delivered on time, on specification and on budget and without a single branch having to stop trading as a result of the work schedule.

Delivering on the promise
"Running a complex national branch refurbishment programme is like running a train company", explains Mace Retail's Operations Director, Mike Hartley. "Everything has to work to an exact timetable all around the country as any delays have a knock-on effect and cause problems further down the line. Keeping everything on schedule while also raising the bar on quality, as well as managing costs is what we are about and that takes experience and an understanding of a client's business issues."

Mace Retail puts great store in working in partnership with its clients and supply chain. For the Abbey programme Mace instigated workshops, monthly review meetings as well as social team building events with five contractors employed by Abbey. Some of the contractors had worked with the bank for a number of years but Mace needed to introduce new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to ensure that its ‘right first time' policy became the norm and snagging delays did not derail the schedule. In the event 52 branches were delivered without a single snagging item.

Both Abbey and Mace considered it important that all branch managers were well briefed on the scope of the work to be carried out on their premises, the timings and how disruption would be minimised. In addition it was keen to bring on side the local facilities managers who normally maintained the branches. "With any major refurbishment programme the people you come into contact with are important," comments Mike Hartley. "We are either going to be disturbing their workplace for a while or we may be asking them to work with us in a new way - so we have to get their buy-in to what we are doing at an early stage".

Through experience in delivering branch refurbishments programmes, Mace has developed a series of robust processes and software to review supply chains, scope projects, implement KPIs and manage schedules and budgets efficiently. "The project was successful because the programme management was excellent," says Abbey's Development Manager Alan White. "Mace had the tools and IT software to deliver at the speed we needed. The logistical aspects were key for us. Keeping to the programme was critical as there wasn't room for any slippage." In fact one of the Mace communication tools, a dashboard report that highlighted progress from a number of suppliers in a range of areas, was considered so useful by Abbey that the organisation has adopted the concept in several of its own business areas.

"We learned a lot from the Mace team," said Chris Daniel, "and I think they learned a lot from us - it became a very close relationship. With good teamwork we were able to control finances, maintain quality and sign off up to 10 branches a week, which was a tremendous achievement. From our point we had a Board that didn't change its brief or its budget during the length of the programme, which was also a crucial factor in achieving our delivery dates."

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