In part one of this blog, I detailed the top six issues facing retail facilities maintenance:
- Timeliness: Ensuring service requests are issued in a timely manner to keep equipment up-time at a high level.
- Authority: Store employees often lack authority or understanding of how to deal with a service request.
- Visibility: When a request for service is made, the store often lacks visibility into which vendor has been assigned.
- Scheduling: Repair scheduling is not necessarily coordinated with the store staff.
- Ease of Access: When a store has multiple open service requests and work orders, staff need one place to quickly see the list and status of each.
- Rating: As work is completed, store managers often feel they don’t have a way to record feedback to the company regarding the quality of service they received.
Knowing what retailers face, let’s now review the role the right tools can play to positively affect the efficiency and timeliness of creating and managing service requests.
The right solution to address the above issues must provide the retailer and their staff the ability to:
- Easily create service requests through an intuitive software system that is user-friendly for both the power and occasional user.
- Receive service arrival windows through the system to allow the manager to plan their time and that of their assistant managers accordingly
- Provide quick access to the status of all service requests and work orders for their store with smart search capability for ease of use
- Require the store’s approval of the work quality, timeliness and completeness and the ability to rate vendor performance prior to the vendor’s payment
And most importantly, from a facilitation prospective, the right solution must:
- Provide store management an intuitive mobile solution which allows them to handle all aspects of the service request and work order process with their smart phone or tablet from any location with internet service. This would provide them the ability to:
- Create service requests from any location
- Have the system prepopulate all administrative information about the store into the service request
- Simplify creation process for service requests through intuitive “smart” dropdowns that will allow those with system access and regular or only occasional experience to effectively create requests
- Upload pictures and documents to the request quickly and intuitively
- Quickly find and view all existing service requests and work orders for their location through smart search functionality
I spent part of my career overseeing the facilities department at a multi-unit restaurant chain, and faced the challenges and ensuing frustrations that our managers had to deal with on a daily basis when it came to keeping their equipment up and running. So, it’s great that I now get to shape a solution that helps address these very problems.
Interested in learning more? Download Tango’s Facilities Maintenance datasheet:
