NHS Sheffield makes 20% time saving plus avoids cost of compliance hire using SFG20

In this in-depth case study, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust Estates IT Lead, Mathew Houghton explains how implementing SFG20 into his workflow has already saved the trust the cost of hiring an additional compliance professional AND is forecasted to save at least an additional 20% or 7.5hrs per week out of his jam-packed 37hr schedule!

We interviewed Mathew to find out more about his experience upgrading from the SFG20 superseded software to Facilities-iQ, our latest and greatest software solution.

Who are Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust?

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of the UK’s biggest providers of integrated hospital and community-based healthcare, providing a comprehensive range of local and tertiary services to the residents of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, Mid Yorkshire and North Derbyshire alongside some highly specialist services to all parts of England.

Who is Mathew Houghton?

As IT Lead, Mathew is in charge of the CAFM system used to manage maintenance workflows for the Trust’s estates, which include Northern General Hospital, Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Jessop Wing, Weston Park Cancer Centre and the Charles Clifford Dental Hospital.

“I maintain the actual system to keep people scheduled”, Mathew explains. “This includes daily activities, PPMs, unplanned maintenance or reactive works etc.”

How was the Trust keeping on top of their maintenance responsibilities before adopting SFG20?

“We were doing our best, but keeping abreast of all the latest technical updates, information about how things are maintained, assets, buildings and the estate essentially was proving difficult.

Many people went off on tangents dealing with their own bits in silos rather than having one central repository of all that information, which is what SFG20 provides.

We had an old system that was heavily paper based but obviously we live in the digital age now, so when I joined the trust in 2018, I quickly realised the system was lacking in a lot of the features that modern organisations really need to be working with.

That started the journey to getting a CAFM, but when I was asked to keep up with legislation as well, I knew I couldn’t do it all myself - that’s a full-time job!

Rather than pay someone to keep on top of all those HTMs, HBNs, legislation etc, I thought there must be solutions out there which provide that service at a fraction of the cost that you would pay someone full-time, so let’s do some research - and that’s where the journey started that led me to SFG20 ultimately.”

Why did you choose SFG20?

“It’s BESA backed and it’s the industry standard, that’s what I saw it as. From my research, it seemed to be the product to go to.”

How did SFG20 solve your problems?

“SFG20 gives us easy access to all compliance information quickly and the technical bulletins we get monthly keep us up to date so we can quickly jump into the system, find any sort of schedule changes and adopt them as quickly as possible. We conduct internal meetings to make sure that we have the capacity to handle those changes if necessary, but SFG20 allows us to be on the pulse.”

Mathew estimates that the full process of checking the latest SFG20 technical updates and manually updating his maintenance plans in his CAFM took up around 20% of his time.

“Two of me would be a lot easier” he remarks.

This is why CAFM and other FM systems across the globe are choosing to partner with SFG20 and integrate with Facilities-iQ via our API to solve this time-consuming problem.

Mathew will soon be able to update his maintenance plans at the touch of a button, enabling him to save 7.5 hours a week of his time! To find out which FM systems are partnering with us, head to our Digital Partner Programme page.

“We’re NHS, so for us it’s all about prioritising the patient experience and saving money ultimately. We’re a non-profit so we aren’t focused on making money but saving it.

 We’re still doing a large body of work to prove that we are actually making time and cost savings, but it’s a massive task as we have 2 major hospitals that we manage and the CAFM systems are not fully up to date, so it’s still an ongoing evolving process with that.

"When it comes to carrying out compliance checks, our primary focus is clinical areas and then non-clinical areas. SFG20 has given us the knowledge that we are doing things correctly, as well as which tasks we have to focus on.”

Specifically, Mathew explains how SFG20 has made it easy for him to separate out statutory (legally required) and non-statutory maintenance tasks, allowing for a more efficient use of resources and resource planning based on criticality.

“We generally look at the statutory tasks,” Mathew admits. “Because obviously that’s legal compliance, and you can’t get away from doing that. The non-statutory tasks we look at on a case-by-case basis. If we have the resource, it’s nice to have but not critical.”

How are you finding Facilities-iQ?

“For me, obviously the new layout was great. It’s more modern,  refreshing and easy to navigate through, and I do like the comparison feature which makes it easy to compare old schedules to new schedules.

It’s perfect - it does everything it needs to do and saves me messing about printing out documents or getting multiple screens up and trying to read through and highlight certain areas. It does it for you and it saves so much time.”

How was the migration process from the superseded SFG20 software to Facilities-iQ?

“For us, it was straightforward. We use SFG20 to understand the updates and then upload them into our system.

There are a bunch of new features I’m looking forward to exploring such as creating custom schedules and adding assets to work out holistic timings over what it takes to maintain buildings, which is really going to help us calculate the labour resource required to maintain our hospitals.”

How was your experience with the onboarding process?

“Perfect, seamless. Lesley was very patient. We had the 3-day training session, obviously I was part of the beta testing too so I already had a decent understanding of it. It’s nice having my colleagues getting licenses too - the new subscription model means it’s not all on me anymore.”

Was the software hard to learn?

“No, it’s intuitive and simple. Navigation is there, the breadcrumb trail is there. You haven’t tried to reinvent the wheel too much, which is a good thing, because people are used to existing systems and established navigation styles.”

How do you think the software will make a difference to you personally?

“It’s easy as I said - I found the search feature a lot better, things are quicker to find, the technical updates are there and it’s saving me time, that’s the biggest benefit for me.”

How would you rate working with us and why?

“Working with SFG20 has been great. You’ve been professional, patient and you’ve got the technical knowledge of what you’re doing which gives us the confidence to trust you.”