It’s only as of relatively recently that a great many of the UK’s businesses have begun taking a more serious look at their own LEV systems and extraction technology in general. It wasn’t all that long ago that the idea of nationwide LEV testing was to a certain extent considered optional – it might help your systems work a little better, but at the same time it wasn’t what you’d call compulsory. However, the way in which health and safety in the workplace is a subject that’s becoming more pressing by the day has led to a situation where to overlook the importance of LEV maintenance and the likes is to leave businesses and the owners thereof wide open to a whole world of potentially hideous consequences.
So in terms of the importance of periodic testing, there’s really no two ways about it – it’s practically mandatory. However, when it comes to choosing the appropriate service to carry out these duties, how can you be sure they won’t leave you and your workforce in harm’s way?
Well, more often than not the key lies in carrying out a few very basic checks before going ahead and hiring any given brand. But along with the obvious checks on matters like reputation and price, there’s also a supremely important deciding factor to bear in mind – that of whether you’re looking at a direct service provider or a middleman.
Does either of the two guarantees a better or worse deal than the other? Technically no, but in dealing with middlemen rather than going direct, you nonetheless leave yourself wide open to the following:
Quality Inconsistencies
First of all, when any given brand or business brings in outside help for any given project, they put themselves at the mercy of these outsourced individuals. When you use different people all the time for any given job, you cannot in any way expect any kind of consistency of output as the strength of the team will be different every time. This is exactly the case when it comes to LEV companies that bring in outside help – sometimes they may be great, but on other jobs they may be held back by the distinct lack of skills and talents their hired workers possess.
When you hire directly, you hire an in-house pool of talent that guarantees consistent quality across the board.
Logistical Issues
Chances are you’ll want to get the job done not only right, but ideally as quickly as possible. When you deal with a provider directly, they’ll give you a time, a date and a schedule which will in 99.9% of cases be stuck to like glue. By contrast, hire a team that uses third-party help and the chance of some kind of delay or complication entering into the process increases exponentially. As such, there’s simply nothing to gain by going to middlemen to organise what it is you need, when you could just as easily go direct.
Overall Costs
When you choose a middleman to basically serve as a go-between in any business scenario like this, you’re unnecessarily adding an extra person to the picture – literally for no good reason at all. In the example of LEV installation and maintenance, chances are they’ll simply relay orders and instructions to the actual provider in order to make sure the job gets done, only to then add something of a premium or commission onto the price to pay their own wage. After all, it’s not as if they’re doing what they do for fun – it’s all about the money. So really, you’re paying a superfluous person an undisclosed sum of cash for doing nothing more than you could have done yourself faster and 100% free of charge – relaying the order to the provider.
Aftercare Issues
Last but not least, it’s usually safe to say that in the weeks and months that follow the installation of a new LEV system or after any large scale repairs for that matter, there will be at least some questions to ask or concerns to address. When you deal directly with the provider this is pretty easy to do to say the least – you just make contact with them. However, where middlemen and third-parties are involved, it might be a case of sending all messages and communications via another individual or service, which in turn makes the whole saga so much more complicated and long-winded than it needs to be. You might eventually get the service and the result you were hoping for, but chances are it’ll be an unnecessary pain to make it happen.