When we met with Gordon White he was drinking a well deserved cup of tea, having just come down from the roof where he had been assisting MITIE engineer Richard Doyle to fix some broken door hinges that the wind had ripped from a chiller housing. 

Gordon, who comes from a mechanical engineering background, is Head of Region, Great Britain for the Property Services team at RBS, which comprises 146 staff, supporting over 90,000 RBS employees across 3,000 properties in the UK. RBS is a major contract for MITIE which manages the Technical Facilities Management for the “critical” buildings in the East and Scotland and the North Regions. 

In a major programme to work in closer partnership with their supply chain, Gordon and several other RBS Property Services leadership team executives have been “returning to the shop floor” via their major service providers. Not only has Gordon visited Technical FM, but other members have visited cleaning, security and catering to find out just what life is like at the sharp end. 

On his return to the shop floor, Gordon first visited the primary show site building on Southwark Street, London, known as Bankside. There he went through our induction process before being kitted out with a MITIE polo shirt and overalls, plus all the necessary PPE and work tools. Finally, before getting his hands dirty, Gordon received appropriate health and safety training for the day ahead.

Gordon was keen to see Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) in action as they have just been rolled out to this part of the RBS contract. The PDAs have been deployed at five key sites so far and enable engineers to track a job right through from start to finish. It makes life easier for RBS and MITIE to manage and control PPM and reactive tasks and brings with it measurability plus the added benefit of being able to gather feedback for measuring customer satisfaction. 

Before completing his visit at Bankside Gordon did a walk-about around the site and was given some PPMs, a reactive task and a “Find & Fix” to complete. “Find & fix” is a proactive approach to repairs that MITIE undertakes for RBS on this contract to reduce the number of fault calls to the RBS helpdesk. 

After lunch it was time to visit one of the larger sites in the portfolio - Coutts Bank building at 440 Strand. PDAs have not yet been deployed at this site so it was back to the old school way of doing the job with faxes and phone calls. 

After a stimulating but rather tiring day, Gordon remarked, “MITIE engineers do really valuable work and are now seen as an integral part of the wider RBS team. This has been a really great way for me to learn first hand the challenges they face in their day to day work across the operation. There is no substitute for hands-on experience and I will be taking away some valuable lessons to help with our future plans.” 

-ENDS-

Notes for editors

What is MITIE?
We’re the strategic outsourcing company. What does that mean in practice? We manage facilities, properties and assets for our clients across the UK and beyond.

We work with our clients in three ways; some take full advantage of our whole range of expertise, others may only need one aspect of what we do:

Strategy and consultancy
+ Facilities and project management
+ Service delivery

Our strategic input can add value at the highest level by helping clients to manage their assets, while our practical management expertise can save customers money and reduce their carbon emissions. We work with a vast number of clients in every industry across both the public and private sectors and deliver the broadest range of services that can be found in one place: from integrated facilities management to engineering maintenance to lifecycle energy management and much more.

There’s a lot more to MITIE than you probably think. We’re a big company with big ambitions – a leading FTSE 250 support services business, with more than 56,000 people, revenues in excess of £1.7bn, and a reputation for being the best.

Visit us at www.mitie.com