F&RM sits down with Alison Phillips of Ocado Group, to discuss ongoing fire safety developments and working with their insurers.
In 2019, Ocado’s Andover Customer Fulfilment Centre (CFC) suffered a large, and wellpublicised fire caused by an electrical fault at a battery charging unit. That blaze would knock out 10% of the retailer’s entire capacity, and cause significant delay and disruption to customer orders. A further blaze in 2021 at their Erith CFC in south London, was caused by three robots colliding. However, this incident only affected 1% of the grid capacity for a short period of time.
So what changed and what has been put in place which meant this second fire had less impact, and how has Ocado Group’s relationship with their insurers, FM Global, helped to improve standards and resilience moving forward?
Insurer approach
Alison’s career to date gives a good overview of some of the challenges the insurance and fire protection industries face when working together. Moving between fire engineer consultancy work, with a strong emphasis on
life safety, and roles with large insurers and brokers (including Marsh McLennan and AIG), where the focus was on property protection, these polarised approaches were laid stark each time.
“Around about 2002, the insurance market went hard, and I was working with a client within the food processing and distribution arena where their insurance fell away from them overnight – they just couldn’t get coverage as a consequence of combustible paneling. Until that point, I had an incredibly polarised view of fire safety. It was all about life safety, because that’s all I had been taught at university. I hadn’t been taught about property protection. This was when I had that epiphany moment where I realised that fire safety shouldn’t be polarised, it should be a symbiotic relationship between both life safety and property protection.”
Finding a role in an organisation that has this approach to its fire safety has taken some time, but at Ocado Group she feels she has done so. The work they are engaged with to provide property protection now also raises the bar in terms of life safety, and to do that they have looked to build on the collaborative relationship they have with their insurer. Traditionally the client/insurer relationship is a transactional one, with the broker offering a financial product to the client. Ocado Group increasingly work with FM Global in an advisory capacity too, giving them even more access to engineering capabilities, knowledge, and experience in operating regions across the world. Accordingly, this atypical approach has “significant net benefits.”
Alison added that FM Global are “embedded within our organisation, so whenever we do projects, they have a seat at the table and we are getting real time advice, not retrospective or after the fact. When we are constructing our buildings, we get more advice and guidance at the design stage. And we get their engineering expertise, from concept all the way through to handover. Operationally as well, they understand our business intimately, and as a consequence, they are able to provide us the very best advice.
“We’ve reinvented what that insurance relationship looks like, for the benefit of the insurer, because they will understand our risk better, and for Ocado Group.”
This collaborative approach includes twoway communication, with the insurers providing data insights with regards to risks that they’ve experienced within similar top-loading storage facilities, and the client sharing details of their own risks. Together they can then work on what best practice looks like and ensure it is implemented within Ocado Group sites.
Risk control and improving resilience in response to incidents
Top-loading storage arrangements are relatively new to the industry as a whole and as a consequence, the entire industry has had to learn more about robotics and engineering thermodynamics within grid arrangements. Following the fire at Andover, Ocado Group identified areas to improve the safety of their CFCs, both for firefighting and for the workforce. These were in place at Erith and supported the containment of the fire there, and Ocado Group continues to work with FM Global to identify attenuation measures in their sites and new technologies.
They have also embarked on a significant amount of research with regards to software programming and design and control systems. Research is continuing into improving fire safety and building resilience within CFCs the world over. “We have learned a tremendous amount since 2019. The amount of innovation, creativity, and energy that has been channeled towards fire safety risk management is quite phenomenal.”
As the demand for online grocery provision increases, in part due to the pandemic lockdowns but also due to shifting customer expectations, Ocado Group has grown significantly. Andover was their first top-loading storage facility and a high volume of their business went through this site. The disruption caused by the fire in 2019 highlighted the need to further increase the resilience of their growing business.
But delivering resilience is also about getting business back up and running quickly, and Ocado Group’s response to the Andover and Erith fires has seen an increase in the testing of their business continuity risk management plans. By running regular exercise scenarios and inviting external stakeholders to work with them, including the Fire Authority and FM Global, all parties can become familiar and share knowledge on how top-loading storage facilities function and what risks there are associated with them.
“It’s about having robust procedures in place, and for there to be adequate communication. So everyone knows what to do, when to do it, how to do it.”
Leading the way - guidance and best practice
“Currently there is minimal regulation and little in the way of set guidance for fire safety within top loading storage facilities, but with so much value tied up in them, both in business continuity and also in the physical assets, insurers have set the standards. Using their data insights and interrogating their loss history to understand and mitigate risks, they can develop their standards to benefit the wider built environments and fire safety community. We can set the bar, and then we can raise it. And that’s exactly what Ocado Group is doing in collaboration with FM Global. It’s setting the bar and then raising it. We are sharing our learnings for the benefit of the wider fire safety community. It’s really important to us that lessons learnt are shared.”
The discussion of fire safety in CFCs and top loading storage facilities is shared across the entire fire safety community. Ocado Group works with fire brigades across the UK, the Fire Authority, the Institution of Fire Engineers’ special interest group that looks at distribution, logistics, and retail, and also their competitors. Guidance on top-loading storage facilities is being produced by FM Global to the benefit of all.
“Ocado Group has learned its lessons and we’re in a better place as a consequence, but we also want to ensure that we share those learnings with the wider fire safety community."
Fire & Risk Management is the UK’s market leading fire safety journal, published 10 times a year, and is available exclusively to FPA members in digital and print format depending on your requirements. You can find out more about our membership scheme here.
Alison Phillips is Head of Fire Safety Risk Management for Ocado Group.