Technical Maintenance & Facility Management

Joachim VITAL-DURAND, Business Unit Manager of VEF Facilities Nord-Ouest IDF, has built on his multi-technical maintenance and energy efficiency expertise to gain a strong competitive edge in the Hauts de France region. We present a portrait of his business unit.

Could you describe your career?

Following 10 years at SODEXO Facilities Management in the Greater Paris area and then in Normandy, I had an opportunity in May 2018 to join VINCI Facilities in Lille. Since then I have been Business Unit Manager of VF Building Services.

Could you tell us more about your business unit?

Until the end of 2017, there was only one VINCI Facilities business unit in Lille – VINCI Facilities Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Its scope covered the Nord and Pas de Calais departments.
This business unit had experienced rapid organic growth over the previous 10 years and also expanded with the Cegelec acquisition in 2013. It had reached “critical” size. Rather than continuing to move it forward like a large ocean liner, it was decided to segment it intelligently by creating two new business units.

On 1 January 2018, the VF Mobility and VF Building Services business units were set up.

How are these two business units currently segmented?

VINCI Facilities Mobility holds half the project portfolio, with its activity focused on bank and branch networks – in other words an activity in which field technicians make rounds to maintain 480 post offices, 300 branches of the Banque Populaire and 250 branches of the Crédit Mutuel Nord Europe.

My business unit, VF Building Services, holds the other half of the portfolio and operates at sites that have a sufficient volume of activity to enable us to assign permanent technicians. These are primarily private sector customers such as banks, insurance companies and data center management companies, of which there are a large number in the region. We also have a number of contracts at industrial sites such as the Gravelines nuclear power plant near Dunkerque. For that customer, we carry out the full range of HVAC and plumbing maintenance in the 80,000 sq. metre offices adjacent to the site.

What is your expertise and your competitive advantage?

We are able to offer and deliver energy performance services. We can significantly reduce energy consumption in certain buildings and meet performance commitments, notably financial, via EPCs. We do this in partnership with HUB ENERGY. Julien WALLET is our energy efficiency expert within the business unit. He coordinates this part of our work, in which we perform preliminary audits in the run-up to EPC contracts, and he also sets up energy monitoring to ensure that we meet the commitments we make to customers. This gives us a good competitive advantage.

What is the most recent contract you signed?

On 1 January we signed a multi-technical maintenance contract with the head office of Oney Bank, a subsidiary of the Auchan Group specialising in payment solutions and consumer loans.

The Oney Bank head office is a 12,000 sq. metre building in Croix, built at the site of a former clinic with SPIE as maintenance company.
Thanks to our relationship, we signed a general services client assistance contract in 2016. One of our managers was assigned full time to the site to provide support for their General Services Manager.

When the contract expired in 2018, Oney Bank issued a call for tender for multi-technical maintenance and decided to ask us to bid on it.

We presented a carefully crafted multi-technical maintenance bid in hopes of being able to work there. It is a showcase building with excellent maintenance and energy performance opportunities.

We focused our presentation on energy efficiency, knowing that they were worried about their electricity bill. We knew that the heating system was operated 24 hours a day and that there was no coordination of their installations. We stressed those points in our presentation.
The services we offered included: fluids management, plumbing, power supply and ELV network, fire detection, and HV substation maintenance (the only thing we did not obtain was HVAC maintenance, which has traditionally been provided by a local company).
But also, the BMS / BAS works package was part of their specification – they wanted comprehensive, efficient supervision of their building. We also made our CMMS tool available to them, free of charge, which is another excellent way to win customer loyalty.
Lastly, we proposed energy efficiency action in the form of four EEA (Energy Efficiency Action) sheets.

Where do you stand now?

At the end of January, we will be able to see how much energy has been saved. We have committed to a 4% reduction in the energy bill in the first year.

The contract has been signed for a period of three years (Budget: €45,000 per year of P2 maintenance).