National Ice Centre & Motorpoint Arena

Background

The NIC and Motorpoint Arena Nottingham has a crowd capacity of 10,000 and is the largest entertainment venue in the East Midlands. Since opening in 2000, the venue has welcomed over 800,000+ visitors per year, and showcases some of the biggest names in music, comedy, entertainment, and sport.

Part of the Nottingham Ice Centre Ltd Group, the arena is home to the Nottingham Panthers who are the ice hockey 2016 Challenge Cup and Play-off champions, and 2021 Elite Series Champions.

The need

Compliance and an audit trail are absolutely vital to running a huge venue and ensuring the health and safety of visitors. Prior to 2019, the team had an overwhelming amount of paper with single sheets, books, word documents, and excel documents.  Accessibility of documents and storage were key challenges in addition to each department doing things their own way.  The team agreed that to run more efficiently they needed a single solution that everyone could access, and that would store everything relating to asset and maintenance management under one roof.

In 2018, Pete Brown (Facilities Tech Manager) was tasked with finding a system and set out on a due diligence process to identify the right system for their requirements. Having used Agility in a previous role, Pete spoke to SSG Insight and selected Agility as the asset and maintenance software solution for the NIC and Motorpoint Arena Nottingham. Pete shared:

“We needed to eliminate all the paper and ensure all activity and documentation was stored under one roof, in a central location. Accessibility was and still is key for us. We also needed something that was easy for everyone to use across the venue from Operational staff to Facilities.”

Ben Taylor (Asset and Compliance Manager) added:

“The council or the fire brigade could audit us at any time and require certain information. We wanted this information to be readily available and easily accessible to anyone who might be on site at the time. We wanted to remove the need for people to have to search for paperwork which isn’t always easy. Agility allows us to do this with the simplicity of the system”

Pete went onto say:

“We wanted to track all our maintenance activities online for compliance and audit purposes, and we knew that having a system like Agility would provide us with more operational efficiencies.”

Solution

Agility CMMS provides game-changing data insight by managing parts and equipment as well as people and processes. Despite starting their implementation as Covid struck the world in 2020, this didn’t hold the team or the project back.

“Once the system was in place, we moved all our PPMs onto Agility so that we had everything in place. We then quickly took advantage of the easy to interpret visuals and graphs that Agility has to offer, displaying due or overdue PPMs. We project these onto a wall so that everyone can see them. This information forms part of our daily briefing and includes anything from maintenance repairs, cleaning requests, issues with our vehicles, and more. It makes the briefing easy as people have a visual to focus on and can see what needs to be done.” Shared Ben.

Pete went onto say: “The technicians within my team are self-sufficient thanks to Agility. The first thing they do is check their emails and Agility. They all have access to the mobile app which makes it easy for them to see which jobs they need to do and where and provides any specific instructions. They can also upload photographs and any notes on the system when they log to say they have completed a job.

The fact that this information all goes straight into the core Agility system means we have all the information we need for spot-checks, monthly health and safety inspections, and more.

With over 10,000 assets on Agility, all with individual model numbers, we are now adding details to all of them. With all our assets and PPMs on Agility with individual codes, when using the global search button, it makes it simple to find things. If the fire brigade were to attend, anyone can search for ‘fire’ and all associated items will come up and can be filtered so the information is right there. If there’s an issue with a gate, we can search ‘gates’ we can see any problems, associated costs, invoices, checks, relating to them.

Everyone likes the helpdesk requests as it’s so easy and quick to log anything that needs to be done on Agility. This can include maintenance tasks, laundry requirements and cleaning requests.

For us, it was a big thing to get rid of all the paper check sheets. We now have barcodes, we can do our walk rounds and building checks, faster and more efficiently as we know all the data is instantly stored and accessible. Agility is a goldmine of information for us.

Agility supports us in our push to become a Greener Arena – getting rid of all the paper is a big part of this award.”

Ben went onto say:

“We have iPads set up all around the arena, any member of staff can use them. They access the Agility app, which shows them a list of work orders they need to complete, including pictures and other attachments which means there is no confusion. The clear displays and user-friendly interface has made the transition from paperwork to the Agility app easy. Staff with limited IT skills were quick to recognise how Agility could support them to do their role and how easy it was to use. Staff feedback has been really positive.

For example, we can be alerted to clean ups required and act as quickly as we can, within minutes of completion, we have a log in the system. It is helpful from a due diligence perspective and the fact that it is all time and date stamped means we have it for future reference should we need it.”

Pete continued:

“The data and time stamp helps when we do our daily walk-throughs on each level. We run various checks to ensure everything is safe, we record when someone arrives at each checkpoint, they complete a detailed checklist which we have created for our specific requirements, and we log the time they depart. Comments can also be added at this point. All this information helps with audits. So for example, the council recently carried out a headline Health & Safety audit and we were able to quickly get up Agility and share any information they needed to know. They were really pleased with the information we shared, and we’re able to do this really quickly and efficiently.”

As a large venue the team not only hold entertainment events, but also sporting events. As the Motorpoint Arena Nottingham is home to the Nottingham Panthers, management of the ice conditions is something that is key. Ben explained:

“The ice team love Agility, they really do. Managing the water quality of the ice involves a lot of checks and we could get a visit from HSE at any time. With the Agility mobile app, the team can do all their checks through the mobile, it’s all online, and again the information is all in one place and can be viewed. This is essential for tracking things like water temperatures for example.

Pete added:

“Other reporting in Agility is also really useful for us. If the tech team within maintenance fixed something yesterday and it is broken again today, we can review that to understand why, but also have proof that it was fixed. We can clearly identify how many jobs are coming through, how many we have completed, how many we haven’t done yet, and efficiently share this with the management team. We have a clear picture at any time.”

Next Steps

For the team at the NIC and Motorpoint Arena Nottingham, Agility is clearly embedded into their everyday working routines. Looking to the future and what’s next Ben told us:

“We have lots of staff who use Agility, but the technical team is reasonably small, so we do a bit of triage when it comes to job allocation, as we know who is certified to deal with electrical work for example. We are looking at the Agility certification module so that we can use it for job allocation, but also to have prompts to advise when training has expired, or if anyone needs to do this course.

We also use SFG20, and we are keen to understand the integration that SSG Insight has recently created. We have a meeting set up to discuss this and it would be great to see how we use our SFG20 license to set up PPMs automatically with their checklists in Agility.

We attended the recent Agility User Day and found it really helpful to hear from other users. They might not be in the same industry as us, but it is great for giving us ideas and thinking about how we further our use of the system.”

Conclusion

“With Agility, it is easy for us – it is all there, it is quicker, streamlined and time stamped. Running a big venue with so many visitors, it is essential to monitor and manage our health and safety requirements, we want all our visitors to be safe and we want to know and track that our team have done everything they can do ensure this. Agility supports us to be compliant as well as to effectively carry out all our maintenance management, and successfully manage our people and processes. It truly is a goldmine of information for us.”