Adopting a Reporting-Focused Culture (Realistically)
Reporting and analytics help you make informed decisions based on real-time data, ensuring your stores run efficiently and profitably. Data can guide your decisions on how to spend limited resources to address your biggest problems.
Of course, you don’t want to adopt new initiatives that don’t fit with your team workflows, or add more responsibilities onto your busy retail teams’ plate. So how can you adopt a reporting-focused culture, without overburdening your team with work?
Focus on Cleaner Data and Clearer Workflows
“Garbage in, garbage out” — this phrase is common for folks who work with data. Your CMMS reporting will only be valuable if your CMMS is updated with accurate information.
To encourage accuracy in your data, all maintenance activities should be kept on one central record, tied to specific assets and locations. A central source of truth allows your team to work off of the same set of information. Tying work orders to specific assets also builds a service history over time, so you can pull standardized data for future store and portfolio decisions.
The other piece of the data puzzle is getting that accurate data from your team. In short: if your team isn’t using your CMMS, you won’t be able to build accurate reporting. You need any CMMS reporting to work for all of the people involved with your maintenance:
Your location-level retail teams need to be able to submit work orders quickly and consistently, and then have visibility into status
Your technicians need robust work order records that set them up for success in the field, and mobile-friendly workflows for adding progress, real-time updates, and notes directly from their phone
Your central facilities team needs visibility into progress without having to hunt down status updates
Your approvers for proposals or invoices need streamlined approval processes, made easy with time-bound assignments and automatic routing based on spend threshold
Defined workflows allow you to build consistency in how maintenance activities are managed and resolved. When your team is generating clean data and documenting it in your central CMMS, you have built a strong foundation for your reporting.
Create Actionable Dashboards
So you have all of your data, and you have buy-in from your team members to manage it. Now, what do you do with that data?
A robust CMMS will offer custom dashboards and report building tools to help you “slice” your data in different ways. To start, you can benchmark some of the core key performance indicators (KPIs) of your retail operations in areas such as:
Open work orders and completion rates, by priority level
Reactive maintenance spend
Preventive maintenance spend
Equipment downtime
Mean time to repair (MTTR)
Operations costs
Vendor metrics about response times, return rates (aka non-first-time-fix rates), and cost
Start with benchmarking for your entire portfolio, then dive deeper into how these metrics track in different regions, locations, equipment categories, and vendors. Different comparative views allow you to identify outliers that need your support for improvement.
These dashboards can also be used to empower regional or location-level teams, giving them visibility into real-time reporting before something snowballs. This is a proactive tool to help supervisors and facilities management teams spot issues before they arise, and empower store teams to see the “facilities view” of their locations.
Find Insights for the Entire Portfolio
Adopt reporting for your individual team members, but also build it for the big picture decisions.
Retail facilities teams need to respond to everyday problems, like a broken light fixture, or malfunctioning cashier terminals. But within all of these daily activities, there is information that is valuable for your operations strategy as a whole.
CMMS reporting empowers your facilities management team to think on a strategic level, spotting patterns across the portfolio. Is there a facilities trend or cost that spikes every year? Is there a certain brand of equipment that is particularly unreliable? Is there one location with stellar metrics, and what can be learned from their systems? Is there a certain failure mode that keeps reoccurring in your equipment?
Whether you have a dozen locations or 100, your operations are complex. CMMS reporting helps you find insights within the data, so you can improve your retail portfolio over time.
Integrate Your CMMS with Other Business Systems
Finally, any CMMS reporting should also integrate with other business records and systems. In addition to tracking maintenance activities, your CMMS can act as a digital filing cabinet for all maintenance documentation. From vendor service level agreements (SLAs) or equipment manufacturer warranty records, you can integrate contract information into your maintenance activities.
Outside of the facilities management group, your maintenance records may need to also integrate with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool, accounting, inventory management, procurement, and more. You have built a foundation of good facilities data, and this can inform organizational decisions across the company.
