Facility Management by Agenda

Having an outsourced solution to manage your facility brings many benefits. It is cost effective and flexible ensuring that there are sufficient well trained staff at all times, enabling the researchers and client management team to concentrate in other priorities. Other tangible benefits include the adoption of a quality performance based approach to managing your facility ensuring continual improvement in processes and service delivery. Agenda's team becomes an integral part of your team supported by Agenda's team of research professionals.

Absence Cover When You Need It!

Running a research facility can be difficult, tight deadlines and legal responsibilities and not having sufficient well trained staff can be a real problem. Agenda ensures that sufficient well trained staff are available to cover holidays, sickness and unexpected peaks in workload. Losing a member of staff to long term sickness can be a major headache, particularly for smaller facilities - let Agenda take the stress out the system and provide help and support when you need it.

Staffing, Knowledge and Support

Agenda ensures that you will always be 100% staffed enabling your busy researchers to concentrate on other priorities. The contract team is backed up with a wealth of research knowledge from the team at head office - a team that boasts over 300 years of management experience, including health and safety, human resources, animal welfare and legal expertise. Many of the Agenda management team are involved in research bodies and committees and regularly present at research conferences worldwide enabling us to ensure that our teams are up to date and current with the latest requirements.

Taking the Stress out of Recruitment

It can take between 3 to 6 months to recruit a technician; but Agenda's facility management support and recruitment consultants will save you the cost, time and effort associated with the recruitment process. For example, the time, effort and expense to advertise, interview and select, carry out pre-employment screening, induction and the training of new staff. Agenda's facilities management contract ensures that you have sufficient well trained staff when you need them saving you time money and hassle.

Quality Based Performance Management

You may think that having your facility managed by a team of contract staff means that you lose control? Well, with performance based quality targets that impact directly upon the cost of the contract we ensure that those things that are important to you are prioritised. We work with you to develop a list of performance targets that are monitored each month. Our performance is scored against achieving your needs and only high scoring and continual performance is rewarded. Monitored monthly and reviewed and amended quarterly, this system gives you full control over the key performance indicators of your research facility. This flexible approach also means that as your priorities change we can adapt accordingly. Below are some examples of the categories that could be used, often with 10 to 30 performance measures in each category.
Example of a Performance Measures Rating Allocation:

Ethical and Legal Compliance

With vast experience of working with academia, contract research and pharmaceutical researchers we understand the needs of the facility users and the ethical, legal and regulatory requirements. Agenda fully understands the Home Office, Health and Safety and other legal requirements and has Licensed, NACWO, RAnTech and NEBOSH accredited staff. In addition Agenda is responsible for dealing with any Human Resource or Disciplinary/Performance issues ensuring that the facility is well run and compliant at all times. This approach offers peace of mind and saves the client valuable time by not having to deal with day to day management issues.

Facilities Management Knowledge

Besides over 300 years' worth of research management experience at senior level, Agenda also has several important support systems for our facility management contracts. These include our own facilities management forum made up of all of our facility managers who meet on a regular basis to provide support and to discuss issues of mutual interest. This also enables bench marking and best practice discussions. Our team of business development staff have research backgrounds and are available at short notice for additional contact and informal discussions. Lastly, the head office team has research, security and recruitment professionals who can offer a wealth of advice on research facility management, animal welfare, legal issues, security issues and much more.

The Ability to Save You Money

Being independent enables Agenda to negotiate the best deals on behalf of its clients, carry out impartial supplier audits and due diligence and to use its bulk power of managing many facilities to get the best price and save its client money. Open book accounting ensure that there are never any surprises or unanticipated costs and with Agenda's in-depth knowledge of the suppliers to the research community the client can be assured of advice based upon many years' worth of experience and keeping up to date with the latest products and services at all of the major research conferences and trade exhibitions.

Professional Pre-employment Screening

All of our contract staff are screened prior to entering a client facility. Our pre-employment screening team of ex-police and ex-military personnel use our high tech Information Security Investigation Systems (ISIS) process, internet mining and investigative skills to provide the reassurance you need. This dedicated team provides pre-employment screening and background checks for many major blue chip and Government research institutions. The screening includes analysis of our Animal Rights Connections (ARC) database containing over 2,000,000 individuals associated with animal rights groups or activities. We carry out red flag analysis and infiltrator profiling on all applicants and also ensure that the person has the relevant qualifications, work permits and the right attitude to animal research and to the job. For more information on the pre-employment screening options available from Agenda please visit www.agenda-security.co.uk/pre_employment.asp

Open Book Accounting

Whatever the payment process agreed in the Service Level Agreement, the invoicing and payment process will be clear and itemised to ensure complete transparency. If the quality based performance measure approach is used to allocate profit it will mean that a higher profit is only achieved through the continual high performance of the facilities management team. Agenda operates an open book accounting system so that all transactions and costs associated with the running of the contract are clear. Discounts achieved on the purchase of consumables and capital equipment will be clearly identified so that the client can see how much money has been saved.

Continual Professional Development

Agenda believes in the continued professional development of its staff, is an accredited Investor in People and uniquely provides a training bank account to all individuals for their vocational and non-vocational training. In addition it is able to set up "on the job" performance and competency based training systems for its clients. Agenda also provides external training such as security awareness programmes to add value and develop a security culture.