CMMS Questions Your Restaurant Facility Team Should Ask
Are there patterns in our work orders that we should address?
Your work orders aren’t just tasks to get checked off of a list. There are critical lessons hidden in your work order data — work orders represent your operational challenges and solutions.
If you are using your CMMS to log all maintenance activities, you can mine this data to find trends in maintenance. What are the common failure points for facilities systems like HVAC or plumbing? What parts are used in equipment repairs most often? Which equipment manufacturer or category has the highest number of issues?
Identifying the “root cause analysis” (RCA) of your most common or most expensive facilities maintenance challenges can inform your entire maintenance strategy, from spare parts stocking to preventive maintenance activities. You can identify trends in equipment issues and begin proactive maintenance efforts instead of being stuck in “emergency response” mode.
Do we know our most important metrics in real-time?
To make the best decisions, you need data. Historical data is useful for analysis and long-term strategy, but real-time data has value for your day-to-day decisions.
Your CMMS should be able to provide overviews of key metrics, such as work orders in different stages of scheduling and closing, and live mean time to repair (MTTR) on equipment and categories. You should be able to see critical KPIs across all of your restaurants, or drilled down by location, region, or vendor.
By keeping an eye on the metrics for your active work orders, you can spot outliers and issues before they snowball or add up to a large backlog.
Do we have visibility into maintenance spend and labor?
In operations, you are constantly making decisions with limited resources. You need full visibility into costs and labor to make your best decisions.
With a CMMS, you should be able to match invoices and costs to assets or locations, with visibility into both the overall spend and details when needed. With this data, you can better understand your ROI on projects, or your repair vs replace inflection point for equipment.
With maintenance labor data, you can also monitor technician hours and work order completion rates, evaluating your team’s productivity and how they are working through your scheduled maintenance activities.
Are there any “sticky points” in our communication channels?
One of the core benefits that a CMMS offers is the centralization of communication, which makes all activities more efficient. Instead of texts and emails that lead to dropped details, everyone can communicate on one platform and tie comments, photos, notes, and timestamps to the central record.
For vendors, you can centralize where they see assignments, leave comments, and submit invoices. For technicians, you can have mobile-friendly work order management, so they can add notes, photos, and updates from the field. And for administrative approval on proposals or invoicing, you can add reminders and time limits for approvals, so that field work isn’t held up by back office details.
Do we know facilities details for each location?
Whether you are managing 5 restaurants or 100, each location has slightly different needs. Your CMMS should maintain standard records across your organization as a whole, while accommodating the different needs for each restaurant and team.
Make work order submission as easy as possible for each location, with custom work order forms with accurate asset lists and problem indicators. You can also assign workflows based on location or region to ensure approvals and scheduling goes to the right people.
For monitoring maintenance metrics, create custom dashboards for different locations to provide insights to location-level managers, as well as provide a quick snapshot of how each location is doing for the facilities management team.
And finally, use customization within your CMMS to log and document details pertinent to each location. That may include lease agreements, different preferred vendors, signage differences, landscaping agreements, and more. Use your CMMS as a digital “filing cabinet” for documentation about the unique aspects of each location.
Does our CMMS make preventive maintenance easy?
Preventive maintenance (PM) is a proactive maintenance strategy that extends equipment lifespan and reduces emergency repairs over time. However, in the busyness of every day, PMs tend to get delayed or ignored. They aren’t scheduled, or they are delayed.
Your CMMS should help streamline the repetitive nature of PM scheduling, by generating recurring work orders automatically based on a set time frame or triggers from inspections. By taking out the manual work of creating PMs, your teams can focus on balanced schedules and best practices. You can also use a CMMS to monitor if PMs are falling behind or getting consistently rescheduled.
