Furniture Village opened its first store in 1989 in Abingdon, Oxfordshire and since then it has grown into the UK’s largest independent furniture retailer with 54 stores nationwide. Furniture Village also sells online.
Prime Systems have been working with Furniture Village since 2015 providing their Accident and Incident Reporting system as well as their Compliance Monitoring and Contractor Management systems. This year they decided to add the Fire Risk Assessments application.
As a business with multiple locations across England Furniture Village knew that as part of their due diligence they needed to review their fire risk assessments but were also very aware that, with the current pandemic and because there had been no material changes to any of their premises, it was going to prove to be a difficult challenge.
Undeterred, they approached their Primary Authority partners Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service to see if they could support them in a new approach to compliance in fire safety. Furniture Village developed a fire safety workbook which was signed off by HFRS as providing sufficient training to ensure competent persons. With this knowledge the teams had the armoury they needed to undertake a fire risk assessment review on their own premises.
Once this training had been completed Furniture Village then developed a series of controls which were reviewed by HFRS as suitable and sufficient for a fire risk assessment to be completed with any next steps being electronically monitored to ensure compliance.
Once HFRS had approved the controls for the Fire Risk Assessment, Prime were able to add these into the application for the stores to complete. Testing was done by Furniture Village users, and HFRS were given access to review the online process. The system was then launched across the estate.
Sue Browne, Head of Compliance at Furniture Village, said, “For us as a business to undertake fire risk assessments on 54 premises would have taken over 6 months to complete but using this system with the support of Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service the risk assessments for all of our locations were conducted over a period of just one week.”
Liam Jackson, Fire Safety Inspector at Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service said, “It was a pleasure to work with Furniture Village and Prime Systems to support them with their fire risk assessments and processes. We are glad to hear that the new system is running smoothly and effectively and hope that other companies adopt a similar collaborative approach to fire safety.”
Paul Ramsell, MD of Prime said, “We were delighted to be involved in the collaboration between Furniture Village and HFRS and their innovative new approach to fire safety compliance. We were really impressed with how smooth and speedy the process was and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend a similar collective effort to our other customers.”
If you would like to have a no obligation chat with Paul about how Prime could help your business then feel free to give him a call on 01494 778877 or drop him an email.
