Overview
- Spotless provide integrated facilities services, and specialise in hard and soft Facilities Management, Cleaning, Catering, Security, Laundries and Utilities.
- Over 36,000 employees across Australia and New Zealand
- ~ $3,000m annual revenue
- spotless.com
The Challenge
It is funny how you start realising the breadth of an organisation once you engage with them and start recognising the potential that an industry has from a data and analytics perspective, once you delve into it.
Spotless provides integrated facilities services to a variety of industries, and specialises in hard and soft Facilities Management, Cleaning, Catering, Security, Laundries and Utilities. One only needs to look around the facility Spotless themselves reside in, to see the amount of data points available. Yet having data and doing something with it are two very different things.
The Spotless Insights & Data team saw the opportunity for Spotless to become a data-driven business. With organisational effort being spent on producing manual reports and insights they needed assistance in outlining the opportunity and shifting the culture.
Spotless Insights & Data Analytics Function Strategic Goals
- Improve brand and perception
- Generate new forms of business using data
- Focus on value leakage in core operations
- Build a data driven culture
Our Solution
The first phase began with our Proof of Value methodology. This allows for the determination of project success within time-boxed scenarios, ensuring feasibility of a project without monetary or time wastage, while allowing for the exploratory nature of data science. Through this approach, Spotless’ culture was brought on-side, getting the wider team excited and onboard with what could be achieved through their extensive library of data points.
A cross-organisation ideation session, leveraging design thinking techniques, produced a starting catalogue of business ideas that could be linked directly to the Spotless business plan.
These were then quickly evaluated and prioritised based on perceived value and feasibility.
Prove the potential value in data science ideas.
To help build sponsor confidence in your data science use cases, Ignite’s Proof of Value delivers:
- The data science opportunity defined in commercial term
- Data profiling and assessment
- All Data Science models created
- Prototypes to bring the idea to life for users
- Product delivery plan
- Business case ready for sharing with sponsors
“We used the Ignite Proof of Value engagement model for data scientists to hack a problem, Michael was extremely capable with an exceptional professional demeanour, able to communicate with both technical and business people.”
“I love the Proof of Value approach to which our subsequent strategy is completely aligned.”
Results
A resulting shortlist of concepts in the Facilities Management, Asset Management domain provided the Spotless Insights & Data team and Ignite Data Scientists the starting point for hypothesis development leveraging the Spotless data.
Three concepts ranging from Bid Management to Predicting Failures to Contractor performance were proven to have tangible value, two of which are now being pursued for early implementation.
The key to success was to quickly understand the business operations, the data, and the potential change impact. Of course, having the ability to tell the story and not just talk about the modelling technique used was paramount.
Where to next?
The first step in the culture shift was to get Spotless’ people on board with the idea that better use of data could provide tangible return. This was not achieved through the glitz and glamour of Big Data or Artificial Intelligence – it was achieved through analysing data that was already present and opportunities already in minds of employees.
When asked about some of the key lessons learned, it was highlighted that focusing on the business value rather than the technical architecture was key:
“Work from a business value perspective not a technical architecture. Technical architecture will necessarily follow when you’ve nailed the business value.”
Derek Del Novo, Business Insights & Data Analytics Manager
As with many Proof of Values, these concepts have highlighted gaps in process and data governance and provided further learnings for Derek and his team to implement as part of the Business Insights strategy at Spotless. It is hard to ignore the facts and that is the beauty of focusing on the business value first.
