Ace Case Study
ACE CASE STUDY
Task: taking the role of the newly appointed contracts manager, highlight a number of initiatives that could be made to combat the problems that are currently being experienced in the provision of ACE Insurance’s facilities management, as well as providing guidance to all personnel about the roles and responsibilities of contract management.
ACE is a company with more than 4,000 full-time and part-time staffs, which has four locations in south of England and main office in Crawley. It is a big company with large amount of staff; therefore, facilities management to the company is very important. Pitt and Tucker (2008) defined facility management as “the integration and alignment of the non-core services, including those relating to premises, required to operate and maintain a business to fully support the core objectives of the organization”. Huang (2008) explained that outsource facility management can help company add value by increasing staff’s focus and flexibility. Reiss (2010) also suggested outsourcing can turn fixed costs into variable costs. However, variable costs happened only when you make a sale, in this case, only when you need service. So outsourcing can help company reduce costs. ACE outsourced its facility management to “FM Services”. It set up a central services team consist of one contract manager and three assistants, and it located in Crawley. As a result, ACE got a significant efficiency saving while making 20 staff redundant and raising some new problems. Angeli (2011) suggested reasons that outsourcing failures were happened are “poor governance, lack of monitoring of relevant indicators, and particularly due to misunderstandings between the client and provider as to the overall objectives and poor cultural fit”. In this case, there is not have a people or team to monitor or oversee the 3PL’s performance; people from ACE did not know whether the sub-contractors have the capability to deliver good services. ACE’s staffs
Task: taking the role of the newly appointed contracts manager, highlight a number of initiatives that could be made to combat the problems that are currently being experienced in the provision of ACE Insurance’s facilities management, as well as providing guidance to all personnel about the roles and responsibilities of contract management.
ACE is a company with more than 4,000 full-time and part-time staffs, which has four locations in south of England and main office in Crawley. It is a big company with large amount of staff; therefore, facilities management to the company is very important. Pitt and Tucker (2008) defined facility management as “the integration and alignment of the non-core services, including those relating to premises, required to operate and maintain a business to fully support the core objectives of the organization”. Huang (2008) explained that outsource facility management can help company add value by increasing staff’s focus and flexibility. Reiss (2010) also suggested outsourcing can turn fixed costs into variable costs. However, variable costs happened only when you make a sale, in this case, only when you need service. So outsourcing can help company reduce costs. ACE outsourced its facility management to “FM Services”. It set up a central services team consist of one contract manager and three assistants, and it located in Crawley. As a result, ACE got a significant efficiency saving while making 20 staff redundant and raising some new problems. Angeli (2011) suggested reasons that outsourcing failures were happened are “poor governance, lack of monitoring of relevant indicators, and particularly due to misunderstandings between the client and provider as to the overall objectives and poor cultural fit”. In this case, there is not have a people or team to monitor or oversee the 3PL’s performance; people from ACE did not know whether the sub-contractors have the capability to deliver good services. ACE’s staffs