Mitesh panniker, senior purchasing manager, property
Keeping our properties maintained and safe to work in during the pandemic involved speedy decision making from the Property team’s Senior Purchasing Manager, Mitesh Panikker.
I joined Greene King in May 2019, so my first year had a very interesting end. My initial 10 months or so were focused on looking at where we could reduce property repairs and maintenance costs. My background is in property procurement, so I also look for efficiencies, like bundling jobs together rather than calling a contractor out twice in one week to the same area. Processes, practices and pricing structures, you could say.
When Covid-19 came onto the radar in January 2020 I think my initial thoughts were: how does this impact our owners and wider group colleagues in Hong Kong? And what will it mean in terms of potential supply disruptions, especially for products and components that might come from, or via, the Far East?
I honestly didn’t think about the health implications at first – not until my partner caught the virus in early March 2020. She was very poorly, and although she wasn’t hospitalised, she was extremely breathless. It was a very worrying time and while we self-isolated at home, she stayed in the bedroom and I had to keep the kids away from her. I had to call around friends and ask them to do food drops to us; there were no delivery slots available, as everyone was doing online grocery shopping.
By the end of that month things were looking serious. With our sites closed, I had to make sure that suppliers weren’t going to complete orders already placed, because now we were shut. I also had to communicate safe practices: if work had to be done at a pub where team members lived on site, how could that be done in a Covid-secure way? With a large maintenance supply chain such as ours, everyone had to be kept up to speed with what they could and couldn’t do under new restrictions. I also had to contact key suppliers to explain the situation so they could understand the impact on their own business.
Scramble for screens
My department works closely with the Risk team and quickly thoughts turned to reopening – and the risks associated with that. As the concept of Pub Safe was being developed the plan was to create protective screens around tills and pay points to form a physical barrier between team members and customers to keep everyone safe.
It was a good safety measure, and one that all public-facing businesses were looking to use. Doug Chadd, a colleague in Property, was working on a concept to create a design suitable for all our sites, which meant producing screens that could be quickly and simply installed on bar tops by team members. As this solution was being developed and tested, our strategic signage partner told us they sensed there would be an explosion in the number of businesses requiring screens. They foresaw that supplies of materials to make them, like acrylic, would very quickly run out, with stocks already being used to make PPE items, like face shields. A shortage of supply would also cause prices to rocket, and availability of large quantities would become scarce.
I fed this back to our management team in the first week of May and was quickly given the approval and funds to buy a significant amount of acrylic via our strategic partner. Thanks to great relationships and quick decision making, less than two weeks later we had secured the materials we needed – not long before national shortages became an issue. We really did get ahead of the game, because sure enough, prices for these kinds of materials increased rapidly and delivery times went well beyond our 6 July reopening date.
Al fresco ready
Over the winter lockdown I was flexi-furloughed and worked with our garden furniture supplier to make sure we had enough stock to serve the maximum number of customers when pubs eventually reopened for outdoor service only. Of course, these things were in high demand, but thanks to excellent working relationships I managed to secure extra tables, chairs, benches and parasols and then organise speedy deliveries so that pubs were able to hit the ground running on 12 April 2021, or whenever they were able to open again. All in all, I consider myself very lucky because I came out of the pandemic relatively unscathed, working for a great business in a very supportive team, with very little health impact on my friends and family. Home schooling brought its challenges. I have two kids and a kill switch on the wi-fi, so if my Teams calls were affected by a teenager turning on the Xbox, I could boot them off. But I know other team members have had it worse with very young children and not being able to easily work from home, so I’m putting it all down as a unique experience I hope never to experience again.