Faced with increasing maintenance problems over the air conditioning, refrigerated display cabinets and general refrigeration in its 160 shops, Pret A Manger turned to specialist maintenance provider, M J Quinn Integrated Services, for a solution. The company’s business development manager, Roy Groves, explains
YOU have to have been living a hermit’s existence for the past decade not to have noticed the impact that Pret A Manger is having on the UK’s changing attitude to fast food. Pret A Manger creates handmade, natural food that is prepared on the premises, in their own kitchens – except for a few of its tiny shops – and free from chemical additives and preservatives.

The first shop opened in London 21 years ago with a commitment to offering what the founders described as “proper sandwiches”, using only natural, preservative-free ingredients. Today it is a £180m turnover business.

There are no “sell by” dates on Pret A Manger’s sandwiches and salads for one very simple reason; at the end of each day what is unsold is offered to charities. Of course, refrigeration plays a key role in delivering this freshness.

Food hygiene and safety legislation aside, freshness is one of the main factors that keeps the customers coming back, and away from competitors’ counters. The same can be said for the air conditioning; eating lunch or enjoying a quick coffee in comfortable surroundings is an important part of the Pret experience.

It was this attention to customer satisfaction which prompted the company to rethink the outsourcing of the maintenance of its air conditioning and refrigeration equipment. Pret decided that it had to adopt a more professional, holistic approach to its shop equipment maintenance. In addition to ensuring that its food hygiene standards were never compromised and that an acceptable level of customer comfort was consistently and constantly delivered, Pret A Manger’s management was determined to have faults rectified promptly, to put an end to shop closures resulting from defective refrigeration equipment, to gain valuable feedback on the performance of the equipment it was selecting for its shops, and to place maintenance on a firm and cost-effective footing.

The successful bid by north London-based M J Quinn Integrated Services focused heavily on three core activities: providing the essential skills and resources; utilising its proven IT infrastructure and reporting mechanisms; and professionally managing both Pret’s reactive service requirements and its planned preventative maintenance.

Now, as part of a three-year term maintenance contract with Pret, M J Quinn has eliminated outstanding fault calls, slashed response times, and streamlined the entire shop network maintenance regime. M J Quinn has also provided Pret with a regularly updated register of its refrigeration and air conditioning assets, reduced costs, and enabled Pret to make real in-use value judgements on the equipment it is using.

While “getting troops on the ground” was an obvious priority, an immediate start was also made on establishing better long-term maintenance protocols. A small number of select engineers and just one manager were taken on board from the previous maintenance service provider and M J Quinn established a dedicated Pret A Manger 24/7 service call desk, which operates as the central point of contact for all maintenance issues. Its specially-enhanced, computer-based planning software, Qu-Trak, which had been successfully used on a number of other major planned preventative maintenance contracts, was also brought into play.

When M J Quinn took over responsibility for Pret’s maintenance, the average number of fault calls at any one time hovered around the 60 mark – a wholly unacceptable figure, particularly in relation to there being, at the time, only 150 shops. Within nine months, M J Quinn had reduced this to ten, during the hottest summer in recent history. Prior to switching to M J Quinn, Pret lost over £500,000 a year through having to close shops due to faulty equipment and, while figures are not yet available for the first year of M J Quinn’s contract, just one shop has had to be closed because of an air conditioning malfunction.

To achieve this performance, M J Quinn located fully equipped service engineers around the country to provide Pret shops with a four-hour maximum call out for what are deemed Priority One call-outs. This is the category into which the vast majority of call outs fall; call out time for Priority Two events is longer and, invariably, the extended timescale is caused by shop landlord delays. All of the M J Quinn service vans are tracked remotely to ensure that the nearest can be diverted to a breakdown, so minimising the all-important response time, and audited stocks of replacement parts are carried in each vehicle.

Understandably, planned preventative maintenance cannot be carried out during normal opening hours without disrupting business and inconveniencing customers. So, M J Quinn’s solution is to undertake the quarterly planned preventative maintenance work out of hours. This is made possible by M J Quinn’s strict policy of directly employing all of its service personnel – however remote the shop location – having security clearance on all employees, and providing each service engineer with the keys to the premises for which he is responsible. This concept required selling to the individual shop managers but, in the18 months that the contract has been running, it has been wholeheartedly embraced by Pret’s management at every level.



Monitored performance

Pret A Manger shops vary considerably in size and, originally, Pret had only limited information on what equipment was in which shop. Neither was there any meaningful service records on any particular piece of equipment. In the past, this had led to repairing pieces of equipment well beyond their cost-effective life; sometimes, the same repair was carried out on a piece of equipment time and time again. M J Quinn now numbers each piece of equipment and logs this, along with its location and service record on the Qu-Trak programme. This provides Pret with invaluable trend analysis information on equipment performance, and M J Quinn with the ability to forecast replacement part stock levels and their distribution throughout the country. Engineers’ call reports are also logged on Qu-Trak, along with call-out response times and service details. This has enabled M J Quinn to establish a number of KPIs that are reviewed every month with Pret A Manger.

This degree of sophistication has enabled M J Quinn to provide evidence-backed recommendations for sustainable equipment replacement and upgrades. So much so that the company is now also involved in snagging new equipment installed in the 20 or so new shops opened every year, and replacing equipment in existing outlets. The information stored and analysed on the Qu-Trak programme is also helping Pret to review the carbon footprint of its air conditioning equipment, with a view to cutting carbon emissions.

Pret’s Jeremy Midmer, head of construction and design, who manages the construction and refurbishment of all Pret shops and conducted the negotiations with M J Quinn, says that the relationship with M J Quinn is a real asset and has met Pret’s expectations. “M J Quinn really has control of our air conditioning and refrigeration maintenance, and its reporting procedures enable us to more effectively manage our maintenance spend and make better informed decisions on plant replacement and the selection of new equipment.” He continued: “M J Quinn’s engineers not only understand our insistence on quality, they are also committed to working with us to deliver it for the benefit of our customers.”

M J Quinn 0151 546 0839