Shaun Kisten Saves NHS £2m Using SFG20

Compliance Manager Shaun Kisten, spoke with us to elaborate on his experience with SFG20, shedding light on how SFG20 can be used to hold maintenance contractors or service providers to account when managing contracts and be used to enforce contract penalties, allowing him to save the NHS more than £2m! How’s that for ROI? 

Shaun also told us how SFG20 benefits him in his current role at St Guy’s and Thomas Hospital and give some bonus advice for building owners looking to draw up contracts with external FM or service providers. 

Who is Shaun Kisten? 

Shaun Kisten is a Compliance Manager with a long and studied career in FM and Compliance and has used SFG20 for many years to assist in achieving compliance targets and saving employers considerable sums of money. 

Today Shaun works as the Compliance Manager for St Guy’s and Thomas Hospital where SFG20 is providing him with a whole host of benefits.  

What problems was Shaun facing prior to adopting SFG20? 

Shaun told us that an NHS employer chose to outsource the management of Renal clinics to make a cost saving. They approached an NHS provider but the contract that was drawn up and signed was not clearly defined.  

“I had to review the contract and what this provider was delivering and found we had massive gaps in PPM delivery.  

This brought me back to SFG20, using your schedule library I was able to discover they were not delivering at least 60% of the statutory PPMs that should be delivered.” 

Shaun went on to explain that this is a common problem in the maintenance world, whereby contracts are drawn up with vague or nebulous phrasing that leaves interpretation up to the contractor on what tasks they should be carrying out and when.  

This opens up the building owner to serious risks, because although the contractor carries out the work, owners hold ultimate responsibility in the case of an inspection or if anything were to go wrong.  

“I believed the NHS had an opportunity to optimise the tendering process and include commercial management to tighten up our contracts and remove ambiguity. We need to make our specification really clear in our tender documents to avoid contractors 'ticking boxes' in order to win our contracts” 

How did SFG20 solve Shaun’s problems? 

“I used SFG20 to review the contract and submit an action plan to the commercial manager. I was able to say that we need to contact the service provider to cost up the missing PPMs, it’s statutory, it has to be done, because our CEO has a legal duty of care to do so.” 

Shaun believes that SFG20 should be used in all contract agreements to clearly define maintenance responsibilities and mitigate risk effectively for all parties involved.   

“It gave us an idea of what services we are paying for and what the FM provider was not delivering. It helped in auditing and performance management. It allowed me to give them 5 figure contractual penalties every month, eventually saving us £2 million on an £11 million contract! 

It's an age-old problem, building owners don't always spend the right money on the right people, or have time to check what their engineers are doing 

Hard FM supervisors should be out checking engineers, but if they don’t there is no proof engineers aren’t just ticking boxes instead of carrying out the tasks they are being paid to complete. 

I knew this was happening because I could see the reports, and some of the timescales they were saying tasks were being carried out in were very unrealistic. Jobs that should take 30 minutes according to an SFG20 maintenance schedule were done in 5, and when I would do random checks with an Engineering Manager, they would have to admit that their guys didn’t do it.”  

What is the biggest benefit that SFG20 gives Shaun in his current role at St Guy’s and Thomas Hospital? 

“It helps us to provide assurance to external bodies such as HSE, London Fire Brigade, and even local authorities that we are carrying out our statutory maintenance in accordance with the Health and Safety at Work Act.  

I also use it as a tool - we are able to quickly prove that we are carrying out our maintenance. 

Where I think it benefits us a lot is that with the NHS there are a lot of older buildings, and it is a good practise guide for us to help us to keep our plant and equipment going, for when we are eventually able to find the funds to carry out a full refurbishment or replacement.  It allows us to maximise the lifespan of our assets.  

SFG20 also helps us in mitigation. Let’s say for example if we had a Legionella risk. Now where SFG20 comes into play is with things like your flushing regimes, temperature checks, maintenance on your chlorifiers, clean chlorination of your cold-water storage tanks and, of course, bacterial sampling analysis as well, which is all mentioned in SFG20. 

That gives us the assurance to prove to our CEOs that our buildings are safe to stay open. If not, then I’m raising a risk on the risk register for that building to be shut down. And that's because they're not following SFG20.” 

What would you do if SFG20 didn’t exist? 

“Oh dear ha-ha! Our lives would be more difficult, and I will tell you why. Many FM directors don't come from an engineering background and, as a result, lack the knowledge about the importance of maintenance and often just see it as a cost pressure 

Therefore, plant and equipment get maintained to the bare minimum standard, or maybe hardly even maintained at all.  

Part of a previous role used to also involve pre-occupation building surveys, I would carry out full surveys and find a building that has been built 15 years ago and the boiler hasn’t been serviced, or the cold-water storage tank hasn’t been cleaned or chlorinated. You find Facilities Managers that don’t understand how an emergency lighting system works, for example, these are the things that I come across. 

It’s great having SFG20 to backup what I’m talking about, it keeps people quiet and stops them trying to fight me on things I can prove they don’t understand and aren’t doing correctly. 

I think it’s especially important for someone who’s a hard FM manager that’s new to the business and come from a different sector, SFG20 is a useful tool for them to hit that ground running and be able to perform.” 

Bonus Contract advice from Shaun when hiring external maintenance providers 

“I noticed when performance managing FM providers in the past that doing external maintenance on a reactive basis is an excuse for them to turn the job into a minor work or project and then to back charge a client.  

But if the client is knowledgeable and if he had SFG20 in the contract, he could use that to his advantage and claim money back from the service provider.  

You could even introduce penalties for poor performance, clauses I’ve begun to introduce into contracts myself.”