Why Retail Chains Fail to Centralize Facility Data

When you manage multiple retail locations, centralizing facility data helps you coordinate your employees, customer service, and vendors more effectively. And yet, many retail chains struggle to centralize facility and asset management data across the whole company. Why? Here are a few common reasons why facility management can be a challenge for retail operators.

7 Reasons Retail Facility Management Isn’t Centralized

No central location for storing facility data

Many small retail chains start facilities management programs with a few spreadsheets and communication via email or texts. But once you achieve multi-location scale, this manual system starts to break down: someone starts saving information locally on their desktop that isn’t visible to other people, someone delays a large proposal because they didn’t know they were supposed to provide approval, or someone forgets to assign a vendor to an outstanding work order and it turns into an emergency.

If you don’t have one central “source of truth” for your maintenance activities, you cannot effectively manage your facility data. Details start to slip through the cracks as everyone chases their own priorities, and when employees leave, they end up taking their knowledge with them.

Records aren’t standardized

You have a lot of data, but it’s not consistent enough to be pulled together without major manual effort. Work orders don’t always contain the information that is needed for repairs. Equipment has different naming conventions at each store. Approval workflows run differently in each region. Service standards are inconsistent, totally dependent on the manager or vendor for enforcing quality control on repairs. Each location has their own “task management” process, opening and closing the store with different checklists.

These differences may seem minor at first, but they can splinter your facility data at scale. Inconsistency in how a maintenance activity is created, assigned, and completed grows risky as your stores multiply.

Facilities teams are stuck in reactive mode

When your team is stuck in “firefighting mode”, they are spending every day dealing with whatever is most urgent, not necessarily what is most important. 

Store managers may be answering the same questions over and over, constantly behind the ball. Instead of focusing on their store responsibilities, they are providing information to central management or to vendors who don’t know the full picture.

At the same time, the facilities management team may be struggling to catch up to how quickly work is moving at retail locations. They spend time trying to get updates about what is happening at stores, rather than strategically supporting what those locations need. And reporting on any metrics takes large amounts of manual work and can still be inaccurate.

Being reactive every day leads to time wasted chasing down issues that could have been prevented with a centralized, proactive system. When your teams are working reactively to operational issues, they cannot think strategically and improve processes over time.

Maintenance system doesn’t work for stores, so they don’t use it 

The difficult truth is that if a system doesn’t work for your employees, they are less likely to use it. Whatever your maintenance system looks like, you need buy-in from your whole team. 

If your team is bogged down in difficult checklists or a time-consuming work order submission process, then they will go around the system. You may find people don’t report facilities issues quickly, work order submissions don’t contain details, or the facilities team is fielding urgent calls instead of receiving formal requests with the information they need.

The intake of facilities issues sets up the rest of the process for success, and a user-friendly system will contribute to greater overall engagement. Your store-level employees shouldn’t need significant training to be able to report a facility issue. Additionally, if store-level teams can’t see where their work order requests go after submission, they may lose track of their requests over time. 

Underestimating the power of portfolio-wide data

When you’re dealing with the problems that arise every day, it can be hard to find enough time to think about the “big picture” of your portfolio. It takes effort and budget to build a strong data foundation. 

However, data on your retail operations can give you real-time visibility into problems, allowing you to capture opportunities and address problems before it affects your stores or customer experience. Portfolio insights should be a core part of your teams’ responsibility, not an afterthought.

Your vendors aren’t integrated with your system

The vendor workflow is multiple steps: dispatch, work order communication, performance tracking, contract and invoice management. You may also need your vendors to help you monitor warranty data or repair history. 

If you work with third-party contractors to cover your portfolio and you don’t have a central work order system, you are reliant on your vendor’s processes and quality control.

And that’s just for one vendor — if you work with multiple vendors, how are you tracking and comparing their performance? How can you ensure documentation about repair activities is stored for future use? Without a centralized maintenance system, managing all of the information your vendors generate and storing it for your future reference is a constant challenge.

Fragmented communications create incomplete records

Especially in retail, where the turnover rate can be high, piecemeal communications can create incomplete records over time. You have multiple managers, multiple possible work order submitters, a complex network of service providers, and a central facilities management team. The mix of stakeholders will vary depending on your company, but you may be trying to track dozens of workflows, email chains, and text threads.

With all of this complexity, information tends to get lost. It’s a struggle to get the immediate tasks completed, let alone be able to look back at previous work or reference asset histories for new repairs — especially if there is turnover. 

Communication also looks different for different teams. Your management team may sit in front of a computer and be able to constantly reference documents, but your store-level teams or field vendor technicians may be dependent on their phones. If your maintenance system is not mobile-friendly, records can start to get lost.

Ready to address these challenges?

If these challenges sound familiar to you, you’re not alone! Centralizing facility data is a common struggle for retail operators, but there are tools that can help.

If you are ready to tackle your facilities challenges,  a Centralized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) provides a platform for storing all maintenance records, asset histories, and facility information in one place. You can build one central solution for your facilities challenges — contact Ecotrak to learn more about what a CMMS can streamline for your organization.

Showcase Your Success

No guide to CMMS reporting is complete without acknowledging that building this functionality takes investment, in terms of budget and your teams’ time and energy. 

Operations is always told to move faster. But investing in reporting and data about your facilities helps you fix things better, not just faster.

Reactive maintenance doesn’t scale. Maintenance should be data-driven, organized, and reveal operational insights that you can use in future development. With accuracy and robust reporting, you can improve your operations, today and tomorrow.