Integral Housing Services and Travis Perkins Partnership Delivers Results The ongoing drive for efficiency, best practice and continual improvement in the repair and maintenance sector has revealed that many building material supply chains are inefficient, expensive and unsustainable. Integral Housing Services is pioneering a new way forward. The company has been delivering planned and responsive building maintenance services to local authority and housing associations homes throughout the Merseyside area for over a decade. The majority of Integral's 260 directly employed local workforce live and work in the area. These mobile operatives include fully qualified electricians, plumbers, painters and plasterers as well as apprentices.

Travis Perkins supplies Integral with general building materials, timber, plumbing heating, kitchen and bathroom products and equipment and Integral represents a high proportion of the branch turnover.

As a result, both parties have invested time and resource to make the supplier relationship as smooth and efficient as possible and Travis Perkins has established a dedicated stand alone warehouse and allocated three full time employees to serve Integral at its Liverpool premises.

Innovations

Through collaborative working, the two businesses have developed a supplier relationship which further supports Integral clients, meeting their needs simply, effectively and without delay.

In turn, the dedicated warehouse enables Travis Perkins to offer enhanced service to its biggest local customer, while still serving its other trade customers.

Integral has invested in technology which allows operatives to place an order via their personal diary assistant (PDA), telephone or fax. Orders are received by Integral Housing Services, approved and sent direct to the Integral warehouse at Travis Perkins, where the orders are picked, ready for collection, and invoices generated.

Ian Jones, Integral Housing Services Director comments: "Our system of consolidated ordering with Travis Perkins, enables us to process over 800 orders and invoices each week.

Our operatives can simply pick up the goods they require and be on their way to the next job. We introduced the PDAs to cut down our response times and to increase our efficiency, 95% of all reactive repairs are now fixed first time making a huge difference to the end customer."

Travis Perkins stocks the full range of products specified in Integral's key contracts, over 500 of which are specific to Integral. The builders' merchant will also deliver goods direct to site, further improving the service to the end customer.

New contracts The two parties work together on product specifications for tendered contracts and hold regular meetings to discuss better ways of working together. David O'Keefe, branch manager, Travis Perkins Liverpool comments: "Integral is a significant part of our business and our continuing open conversation enables both parties to maximise the benefits and work to reduce waste and costs. "We talk to the operatives and the management, gathering feedback on products and offering better alternatives sourced from different manufacturers if necessary. We have seen product specifications change over the years, price used to be the key driver for customers, now quality is definitely uppermost."

Building on this successful partnership in Liverpool, Travis Perkins has now established a dedicated Integral operation at its Barrow-in-Furness branch serving Integral's operatives working on housing contracts in the Cumbria area.