Changing For The Future—adhering To Our Core Beliefs: Preface By Group Chief Executive Waldemar Schmidt

Introduction:

By an ethical business conduct and by investing in people, methods, quality and service development together with our customers, we create a win-win situation for all parties that lead to sustainable growth and profitability. High business ethics and focus on the customers laid the foundation for improving the customer relationships.

THE ROLLS ROYCE OF CLEANING:

Today, the ISS Group’s core business is cleaning and this will continue to be the case in the future. We pride ourselves in being the ‘Rolls Royce’ of the industry, because we have invested over the years in quality, training and systems, all of which now differentiate us in our markets.
One of the key strategic issues we must now address is that of the emerging demand in some geographical markets, particularly the USA and the UK, for facilities management.
However, we need to be flexible and open-minded and seek ways of broadening our service package in those markets and segments where the demand is real, either through strategic acquisitions, or through partnerships

MULTI-SERVICE AND MULTI-SKILLING:

ISS Mediclean, our UK hospital service company, is an excellent example of the success we can achieve by extending our services to respond to specific market opportunities.
When it was acquired in 1989, Medic lean was a hospital cleaning company. Today, it is a true hospital service company, offering cleaning, catering, portering and car park management.
It even helps hospitals turn their canteens into profit centres by handling everything from the redesign and construction of their facilities to the management of the service.

WE NO LONGER CLEAN EVERYTHING FOR EVERYBODY:

We used to think that we were in the business of cleaning everything for everybody. We now believe that there is a more strategic approach to identifying which markets and customers we want to do business with.
By breaking the market up into segments, or groups of customers which share common characteristics, we can choose which segments are most likely to yield the turnover and profit which we need to achieve our financial goals.
We can then identify and target the customers within each segment we want to do business with.
The most attractive accounts are ‘key accounts’, because their contribution to the Group’s health and wealth is particularly significant—either in turnover or in profit terms, or because they are strategically important for other reasons.
Key accounts and non-key accounts usually need to be treated in different ways to ensure that resources are allocated most cost-effectively.

A GLOBAL/PAN-EUROPEAN SERVICE PARTNER:

Another trend which will influence our strategic thinking is the small but significant demand which is emerging for global service agreements.

As the world becomes increasingly more competitive, some multinational corporations are seeking to reduce the number of suppliers they deal with worldwide, in order to achieve cost and quality efficiencies.
ISS sees a major opportunity in this trend.
We are uniquely positioned to offer such corporations a global/pan-European service, because we often operate in many, if not all, of the countries in which they operate.
Our entry into nine Far Eastern countries further underpinned our spread.

NEW MARKETS

We still need to reinforce our geographical presence. There are some other major markets in the Far East which we need to be in, such as Japan, in order to serve our key accounts and benefit from the growing trend in outsourcing. Canada and Argentina are other countries we must penetrate.
As far as our European coverage goes, our only major gap today is Italy, and plans are afoot to remedy this. As far as new service markets are concerned, elderly care will offer increasingly attractive opportunities in some countries.
The ISS ‘Care Concept’ has already begun in Sweden and is in its early development phase in Belgium and the UK.