Technical Maintenance & Facility Management

At the DELL site in Bezons (France), the VINCI Facilities team consisting of four employees and a number of subcontractors remained fully operational during the lockdown to help DELL, a major digital transformation and technology solutions company, continue its activity. Throughout the successive phases of the difficult period, the team worked with another VINCI Energies Group business unit to adapt the advice and services provided to the new requirements. The work included reconfiguring gathering spaces and customer reception spaces to bring them into compliance with the new rules put in place during the health crisis.

“The DELL teams and the on-site VF teams were already working very closely together,” says project manager Stéphane Balzan. “The initial contract, which goes back to 2009, was extended for five years in 2019 with a basic focus on services. Our relationship with the customer, based on trust, gives us broad autonomy in our work at the DELL head office, which under normal circumstances accommodates 800 employees.”

“The DELL manager we work with in the mirror organisation is in Montpellier,” says business unit manager Lydie Ferard Rivoal. “Therefore we were used to handling the customer relationship remotely. Still, the unprecedented crisis upended our operating methods and as we adapted, we were able to strengthen the customer-supplier relationship.”

The teams thus work together day-to-day to operate the Bezons facility for the DELL employees who continued to work in the field to roll out and maintain IT solutions for their customers.

At the height of the crisis, the “Dellians”, as they call themselves, were using 3D printers to manufacture face shields. This local initiative taken by the Paris site became a multi-site project in France and delivered more than 1,500 face shields, primarily to hospitals and nursing homes.

“Our customer sent out a general congratulatory e-mail, which deeply touched us, mentioning ‘the outstanding support provided by Facilities in this distribution’,” says Ismaël Bouaksa, who was particularly involved in the generous mission in the mailroom.

As time went on, other unprecedented issues cropped up and needed to be addressed as an important part of our Facility Management advisory services.

With re-opening now being planned, the VINCI Facilities team is helping the customer prepare to progressively re-start activity while complying with the government’s health guidelines covering such things as social distance floor marking and design of posters, banners, and stickers and traffic direction signs. “The entire site was analysed to identify the areas that need to be rearranged to ensure everyone’s safety, and we installed the corresponding signage,” says Brice Le Heran.

“But it is above all the customer’s gathering spots in Bezons that are an issue,” says Virginie Jayet. “None of the gathering spaces – such as the customer showroom and the DELL employee break rooms and cafeterias – are able to accommodate all the people who use them while protecting their health. Safety is a huge issue.”

“Our customer asked us to re-design the gathering spaces to bring them into compliance with the new rules introduced following the health crisis,” says Sophie Minyem-Etourmy. “The idea is also to show employees that they can come back to their premises without having to worry. To do this, we need to re-think and creatively re-arrange the spaces.”

To carry out the project, VF ITS called on QIVY Tertiaire (Pôle VEF Tertiaire IDF), which specialises in office complex renovation. The contract has been awarded, the last visual aspects have been agreed and the works will get under way in June in strict compliance with the health protection guidelines.

“We support our customers at all times and can extend our scope by working in synergy with another VINCI Energies business unit, thanks to our complementary areas of expertise,” says Lydie Ferard Rivoal. “This gathering space renovation project also fits in with current focus on workspace arrangement concepts. The widespread and unprecedented teleworking experiment generated by the Covid-19 crisis has upended the way our customers operate and prompted them to rethink their spaces in order to ensure their employees’ health, safety and well-being. The project we are undertaking with Qivy may meet an expectation of other customers and possibly generate new opportunities and/or new markets to be explored more broadly in our future SSP process.”