Pest control is a small but high-profile element in a typical facilities management contract. Handled badly, it has the potential to cause trouble out of all proportion to its financial value
No-one wants rodents, cockroaches, flies and fleas in their high-tech, shiny office block or exotic food-manufacturing plant. At best they present a nuisance. More seriously though, they carry diseases that can be transmitted to humans.

Rats and mice will happily chew through electric cables and water pipes, and pigeons rapidly colonise buildings that they see as ideal replacements for the cliff faces which were their original habitat. Damage, contamination, product loss and deteriorating staff relations result.

Prosecution under food safety or public health legislation may follow, and journalists love a good pest control story. In short, effective environmental control is essential.

Many multimillion pound facilities management contracts include provision of pest control services. Some companies will undertake this activity through specialist in-house teams. More often, however, they will sub-contract to a specialist pest control company.

Pest control is a small element in a typical contract, rarely amounting to even a five-figure sum. It is, however, a very high profile element and, if not done properly, has the potential to cause trouble out of all proportion to its financial value.

Therefore, the selection of a reliable contractor, and the subsequent management of them, is vital if such problems are to be avoided.

In-house or contracted out?
Running your own pest control team has certain advantages; not least that it puts you in control of quality and performance. However, pest control is a highly specialised activity and, to be undertaken successfully, requires a team of trained personnel. An in-house team may prove prohibitively expensive when compared to the alternative.

The alternative, however, means ceding responsibility for a highly emotive function to an organisation over whom you have little control, and whose technical abilities you may not have the expertise to assess. You must be very sure about the contractor that you select and should aim to closely monitor their performance.

Before selecting the contractor, however, you must first establish your own, or your client's objectives and compile a specification to which contractors tailor a bid. The specification is vital. Without it you will be unable to compare tender submissions on a like-for-like basis.

The specification
The objectives of pest control specifications are always the same: to eradicate or control any known infestations and thereafter maintain pest activity within agreed limits. These objectives should also be achieved quickly, effectively, safely and at reasonable cost.

As objectives are generally identical irrespective of site, so too is the structure of most pest control specifications. Essential points to be specified include:

  • client policy towards infestation and level of control expected
  • pest species covered within the contract and responsibilities concerning non-contract species
  • type and frequency of service visits
  • restrictions on control options that would otherwise normally be available to the contractor
  • restrictions or limitations on access to areas within the premises to be covered
  • the standard of service documentation required
  • client-contractor liaison procedures and management review proposals
  • terms of contract, payment ad cancellation clauses.

The shortlist
Most facilities managers will have experience of contractors with whom they have previously dealt and so be able to draw on a list of approved suppliers. The shortlist should, ideally, number no more than four. More than this and a contractor may be unwilling to commit the resources necessary for a proper submission.

Where experience or an approved list are either not available or somewhat out of date it will be necessary to shortlist companies with whom you have had no previous dealings. To get to the shortlist stage you may have to draw from diverse sources.

Yellow Pages will normally provide little practical information beyond name, address and telephone number. Of more use might be the directory of members produced by the industry's principal trade association, the British Pest Control Association. The stringent criteria that members have to meet are detailed within the directory, together with other useful information.

A properly constructed pre-tender questionnaire will assist considerably in sifting to the shortlist stage. This should require contractors to provide details of their financial history and stability, health and safety and environmental policies, insurance cover, trade body memberships and, critically, client references, training policy, quality management systems and technical resources and support.

Tendering
Tenderers should be provided with all the reasonable assistance necessary to produce an appropriate bid. They will require adequate time to survey the site, and to appreciate its complexity, geography and pest-related history. Appropriate access may have to be made available to allow this.

For large, complex or safety-critical sites it is often worth commissioning an independent pre-tender survey that should be made available to tenderers.

Having established the specification, determined the shortlist and allowed adequate time for submission of tenders you now have to make your selection.

Selecting the contractor
The criteria to be employed when selecting a pest control contractor are essentially little different to those used for other tendering activities.These will look at whether:

  • the bid was submitted on time
  • it is clearly and professionally compiled and in accordance with the specification
  • the proposed human and technical resources are adequate
  • the contract management and review proposals are appropriate
  • the price is realistic.

This last point is important: the cheapest bid is only appropriate when the tenderer has fully understood the nature of the site and specification. Selection of an inappropriate bid is almost invariably a precursor to future problems.

The choices
Pest control contractors typically fall into two distinct groups — the large and the small. Take-overs and mergers within the industry in recent years having left very little middle ground:

The large companies provide national, or very close to national, coverage administered from either local offices or a single main office.

Smaller companies, ranging from one-man bands to those employing up to twenty to thirty staff, generally operate over a defined (but often very large) geographical area.

Whether you go for a company from the first or second group may be dictated by factors beyond your control. However, it is worth briefly reviewing the advantages and disadvantages associated with both groups. You should also be aware that the first group numbers no more than about five companies so if your selection criteria demand a company of this type you have your shortlist selected already.

Large companies will be able to cover national contracts with the cost savings that this typically entails. They will have a broad range of knowledge and expertise and be able to draw on significant technical and human resources.

Inflexibility, administrative inertia and lack of a single point of contact are common complaints associated with large contractors, however.

Smaller contractors are likely to offer much more direct contact with the company owner or senior manager, and be able to provide a more flexible service. Continuity of personnel is often better and locality may mean more rapid response. Lower overheads may result in lower prices.

On the downside, staff and technical resources may be limited, administration and documentation may be inadequate and corporate recognition in the marketplace, which for a food manufacturer, for example, would be an important consideration, may be lacking.

So, assuming that you have now selected the contractor and that the contract has been running for a few months, is that the end of your involvement?

Monitoring performance
Selection of the contractor may be the last significant involvement that the contract manager has with pest control until something goes wrong. Mice may chew through electric cables resulting in computers crashing. Birds nesting may result in bad smells, staff respiratory problems or complaints about flea bites.

The local environmental health officer may shut down the staff canteen due to cockroaches running over the work surfaces. These, and a multitude of other problems, are just some of the ways that pest control may become an issue out of all proportion to its financial value. It is far better to pre-empt such problems through ongoing monitoring and contract review, an activity that is frequently neglected.

Increasingly, the maxim 'if you can't measure it, don't bother doing it' seems to apply in most areas of business. The pest control industry, and those who employ our services, has been slow to catch on in this area.

The concept of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is well established in many fields, but not pest control. Nevertheless, performance measurement is possible. Many things that pest control contractors do can be measured. If they can be measured they can be used to assess performance.

Some performance criteria will be common to all service providers and will require little or no technical knowledge to implement or assess. These will include, for example, attendance records, response time and staff or customer complaints relating to the particular service concerned. Others however, particularly in the delivery of the pest control service, will require a degree of technical knowledge to assess.

Quality assurance
Matters relating to service quality assurance should be addressed by the contractor through their own quality management system. Quality assurance reports should be made available to all parties — though this is rarely the case — and these reports should not have been 'sanitised' first.

And, just as an independently produced pre-tender survey could assist all tenderers to submit their bids based on information common to all, so too can true quality assurance be built into a contract by using an independent auditor to produce a report that provides objective comment concerning the standard of work by the contractor.

Documentation, attendance records, quality of service delivery, infestation status and effectiveness of client-contractor liaison can all be objectively and quantitatively assessed and incorporated into future performance targets.

Information is power. Performance measurement should be used not as a stick with which to beat poor performers but as a means to assist all parties to get the most from the business relationship.

For the client this will result in the achievement of the objectives detailed earlier: a service delivered quickly, effectively, safely and at reasonable cost. In return the contractor will have a satisfied customer (with the business spin-offs that this normally entails), and may well be receiving feedback that enables them to maximise the efficiency, quality and profitability of their own business.

The British Pest Control Association
Tel: 01332 294288
Email: enquiry@bpca.org.uk
Website: www.bpca.org.uk