Shell SA has signed a four-year deal with PRAGMA, a global facilities management company, to maintain the standards of Shell’s assets at the company’s Retail sites and B2B customer sites across the country.
“Having equipment in good working order is an important component in ensuring that our customers’ interaction with the Shell brand is seamless,” explains Haroon Coovadia, Shell SA Network Delivery Manager. “Pragma will manage maintenance at our company-controlled service stations across the country.”
PRAGMA is renowned for providing physical asset management improvement services and products to a range of customers in sectors such as energy, manufacturing and mining, the public sector and logistics.
“PRAGMA’s track record in countries across the world speaks for itself,” says Haroon. “We are confident that our partnership with them will help us improve and maintain our asset performance, and enable the Shell business to operate at its optimum.”
The process was initiated at the beginning of the year and was followed by a successful stabilising period which culminated in a formal review. This resulted in the formal bedding down of the Shell SA and PRAGMA agreement.
“We had to ensure basic processes, KPIs and performance measurements were in place,” explains Haroon. “We looked at areas such as the time it needs to take to fix pumps, the details of various repair processes, pricing, and measures to reduce HSSE exposure where possible.”
While the new FMC contract is fully aligned with the global model, SA represents the first market where Shell has implemented the global model with a partner other than JCI.
Upon completion of the review, a joint communication was issued by Merilee Karr, Global FMC Manager, and Haroon to announce the successful stabilisation of the new contract.
“When we made the decision to implement the global model with a new partner we knew it would be a challenge, but everyone in the team stepped up, embraced the challenge and delivered what amounts to a sizeable change to the business in a very short time.”
In finalising the agreement, the local team was supported by the Retail COE (Center of Excellence), whose role was to assist in evaluating the contracts from the various tendering suppliers, and then, once an agreement had been decided upon, translating the details and specifications of that agreement into what happens on the ground.
“It will be a challenging road ahead, and we are all motivated and excited to take this forward as one team – comprising our local team, our global partners, and of course, PRAGMA, our FMC provider,” says Haroon in closing.
