Empowering real innovation, Excellerate Services UK & Ireland delivers high quality soft FM services with a technology-driven approach
Dynamic, data-led and dedicated to excellence, Excellerate Services (Excellerate) represents the very best in soft FM service delivery. Its journey began in South Africa in 1978, initially as a specialist security business. Armed with a passion for innovation, Excellerate has since transformed into a high-performance powerhouse, boasting an extensive global presence across Africa, Middle East, UK and Ireland.
Established less than a decade ago, Excellerate Services UK (Excellerate UK) has redefined the standard of the soft FM services sector in the UK and Ireland. Its
unparalleled expertise and commitment to quality have made the business a trusted soft services partner of choice to some of the UK market’s biggest names, including M&S, Selfridges, University of Cambridge Estates Division, and Asahi.
Now, as Excellerate UK proceeds to grow and prosper, it continues to champion its core values of people, process and technology, expanding and evolving further across its core market sectors. Supply Chain World sits down with Johan Venter, Chief Executive Officer at Excellerate UK, and Nick Rastelli, Group Sales and Marketing Director UKIMEA, to learn more about how the company is leveraging technology to enhance its service offerings and operational efficiencies. Johan begins by providing some insight into Excellerate Services’ history and progression into the UK market.
“Excellerate Services is headquartered in South Africa, but we operate across 23 other African countries and the Middle East. We predominantly offer soft services, such as cleaning, security and logistics,” he says. “Excellerate Services UK started in 2019 with a small number of acquisitions, which helped us to really understand the UK market. We then acquired GS Associates (GSA) in 2022 and then Premium Support Services (PSS) in 2023 – both of which were fairly large acquisitions – with the strategy being to enable us to deliver soft FM services on a national basis.
“Today, Excellerate Services UK turns over £160 million per annum and employs more than 9000 staff. The largest part of our business is retail based – we partner with the likes of M&S, Currys, and TK Maxx, for example – but we’ve also got a fairly large commercial and manufacturing client base. Our approach now is to focus on specific sectors and develop teams within each sector who really understand each client’s needs and requirements; we will develop our infrastructure within these sectors to meet expectations.”
Strategic shift
Extending its services to new horizons, Excellerate’s emergence into the UK market has marked a major shift in its wider growth trajectory. Presently, Excellerate UK delivers high-quality soft FM services to over 2400 sites, though this success hasn’t been without its challenges. In line with its dedication to innovation, however, the company has made several strategic operational changes to further improve its capabilities and overall efficiency.
“Our biggest challenge thus far has been bringing three cultures together. We’ve now centralized several of our support functions – analytics, payroll, helpdesk – into our Performance Centre in Glasgow. Additionally, we also merged our operational teams earlier this year, so we now have a one-team approach delivering services under a single umbrella,” Johan explains.
“As we’re engaging with newer clients, we’re now selling as a single entity,” Nick continues. “We’ve leveraged our Performance Centre, which is completing a lot of our analytics and supporting our payroll and support service functions, and we now have a single technology platform that sits across all elements of the business. It gives our clients a dynamic, streamlined and transparent view on how we’re operating our contracts, which has been really beneficial.”
Having been in operation for over two decades, Excellerate’s technology platform, Velocity, has completely revolutionized its operational processes. The system is state-of-the-art, fully comprehensive and specially designed to monitor and streamline its operational processes, from outlining project audits and specifications for its clients all the way through to managing HR functions.
“Our Velocity system is wholly owned and built in-house. It’s been developed over the last 20 years, originally focusing on the security marketplace in South Africa. In the UK, we use it across the board,” Nick elaborates. “It’s a people-focused system, from the outputs it provides to our clients to its scope of HR and people operations. All of our time and attendance is managed through the system, for example, so our staff can access their shifts, holiday requests, and pay slips. They can also communicate with their managers on matters such as health and safety. Likewise, managers can also communicate back to staff regarding expectations, KPIs and audit scores, which helps us to improve performance. We’ve also integrated a video-based training platform to remove the barrier to entry in terms of having English as a first language.”
The power of people
By keeping its people close to its heart, Excellerate UK & Ireland is well-positioned for a bright future. Upholding a strong commitment to high service standards and meticulous attention to detail, the company is poised for continued growth, adapting to a changing market by embracing new technologies that will elevate its business even further.
“Over the next couple of years, we’re aiming to grow the UK business to over £200 million turnover and not stop there! Operating in the FM sector, we really value people and partnership, so it’s essential that we continue to live our values every day,” Nick says, optimistic for the future ahead.
Johan adds: “We will also remain focused on developing our technology solution to stay ahead of the market. We’re utilizing AI to support our auditing, reactive response and rostering functions, which is a first in the marketplace, and we’re constantly looking at what other technologies we can implement to support our clients and our people.”
Looking further ahead, Nick reflects on Excellerate’s most important asset of all. “We’ve got to acknowledge that we are in the soft FM industry, so we can talk about technology and AI all day long, but in reality, our services will also be delivered by people on the ground. The one thing that we hold true is that we value our people, so we aim to be even more focused on people development in 2026,” he affirms, concluding our conversation. “In five years, we’d hope to be a $1bn global company. We’re in a unique space in the market; there aren’t many companies out there delivering soft services on an international basis with fully integrated and data-led solutions.”