Case Study: Sam’s Club

“Our members pay to shop with us, so we work to drive member delight. And what that means is ensuring we understand the conditions of all of our assets across the fleet so we know where to pinpoint investment“

RJ Zanes
Senior Director of Facilities Maintenance at Sam’s Club

Background

Sam’s Club is a member-only retail warehouse with 597 operating clubs and a platform of supply chain facilities across the U.S. and Puerto Rico.   

As Senior Director of Facilities Maintenance, RJ oversees and leads the facilities maintenance strategy for Sam’s Club’s entire fleet of clubs. RJ’s top priority is to understand the condition of every asset to ensure his team is delivering a consistent neat, clean, and delightful shopping experience for Sam’s Club members.  

Challenge

A reliable data-driven maintenance platform to manage an operation of this scale was essential in effectively executing the daily work of tracking, planning, and predicting the needs of every asset. In addition, he needed to execute this full lifecycle asset management strategy in a cost-effective way. To achieve this, he first needed to ensure the foundational elements were in place such as:  

“We’ve got a team of about 4,000 providers across the network. And we leverage that team to drive best practices and innovation through means of various contract types and scopes of work through preventative maintenance as well as things like condition-based monitoring systems.”

RJ Zanes
Senior Director of Facilities Maintenance at Sam’s Club

Solution

Today, RJ is proud to confirm that Sam’s Club is 100% tagged on all of its serialized assets across North America. The ServiceChannel platform collects all of the information for Sam’s Club, and houses it in the Asset Manager tool where RJ’s team can receive real-time updates on any asset at any location within minutes. “I can check on any specific key data point that I need to at any one point in time. I can check on any one specific work order or any one specific asset right from my fingertips,” he says. RJ and his team also leveraged Scout to find the top providers, in every region and trade, who would provide the best value.  

By leveraging data, RJ has not only been able to accelerate decision-making like this, he’s also been able to take a more strategic approach to managing the lifecycle of assets, such as knowing the optimal uptime state for every asset across the fleet and total cost of ownership.  

Results

RJ’s technology-first approach has been instrumental in helping him reach his goal of attaining 100% uptime for assets in every location — and doing it in a cost-effective way. He’s also able to now evaluate his FM program with a more forward-looking lens. “[When] you think about a full lifecycle asset management strategy, it starts with the base foundation of things like condition-based monitoring, asset tagging, quantifying conditions moved through a computerized maintenance management,” he explains. And a platform like ServiceChannel helps support this strategy. “I’m excited about what the future holds. There’s a lot of technology out there. We’re continuing to leverage technology, such as ServiceChannel.” 

*Scout is a free service included with ServiceChannel subscriptions that allow customers to see which provider upgrades will make the biggest impact on reducing costs and downtime.