Case Study: Fast Casual Restaurant Chain
Restaurant Tames Rapid Expansion through Fully Transparent Facilities Management Operations.
ServiceChannel
Highlights
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COMPLETE TRANSPARENCY in work order proposal stage for all restaurant managers
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ENHANCED DATA AND REPORTING to track spending trends and identify anomalies and outliers
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INTEGRATION WITH CORPORATE ACCOUNTING SYSTEM to eliminate redundancy/errors in invoicing & payment
Quantifiable Results
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REDUCTION IN WORK ORDER RESOLUTION TIME
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INCREASE IN VENDOR ON-TIME ARRIVALS
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INCREASE IN QUALITY OF SERVICE
“ServiceChannel has proven to be a great tool, especially in the area of reporting our results, which have improved our budgeting and forecasting processes. With these benefits, ServiceChannel was a pretty ‘easy sell’ to management and other corporate teams such as Operations.“
Senior Facilities Manager
Fast Casual Restaurant Chain
Customer
A fast-growing Northeast-based fast casual restaurant chain, it operates over 260 locations nationally and more than 100 in international cities. The company is known for serving a classic American menu of hot dogs, hamburgers, fries, etc.
Challenges
Due to its rapid expansion across the country, the chain’s facilities management team faced a number of facilities maintenance and repair issues such as:
- Sourcing and managing vendors, especially at locations far from headquarters
- Reliance on an archaic work order initiation process using phone call and email requests
- No systematic, standardized way to perform restaurant inspections and audits
- No effective way to track open maintenance and repair tickets
- Inability to hold vendors accountable to their service level agreements
“Now, vendors know that they’re ‘on-the-clock’ when the work orders are tracked through ServiceChannel. This makes them more accountable and we have seen that the performance has improved. To me, transparency is the key benefit; the system gives us the visibility and transparency in all areas of our operations that we need.”
Senior Facilities Manager
Fast Casual Restaurant Chain
Goal
In evaluating a service automation solution, its FM team was focused on improving vendor management and boosting its program transparency and visibility. Its primary purchasing/selection criteria included:
- Using a centralized platform for vendor performance management with standard KPIs such as response time, work order completion time and costs-over-time
- Generating actionable reports using FM-specific data for operations and forecasting
- Enabling enterprise mobility for both restaurant staff and vendors/service providers
- Increasing transparency in all areas of facilities operations for the FM team and other corporate departments
Solution
The fast casual restaurant chain decided to license ServiceChannel’s SaaS solution after determining that it offered more capabilities in delivering transparency than other FM/CMMS options considered. In addition, the head of its FM team was already familiar with ServiceChannel based on his highly positive experience from using the system for more than six years previously.
Specifically, the company chose to deploy and use:
- Service Automation to facilitate accountability and communications with its vendors and ensure all service requests are resolved efficiently
- Analytics Custom to create ad-hoc reports and dashboards to meet its specific needs
- Mobile App to provide its restaurant staff instant access via smartphones and tablets
- GPS Check-In App so service providers and contractors can easily and accurately check-in and out at a restaurant location, and update various work order details using their mobile phones
- FixxBook to identify and source service providers and contractors for any trade across all its locations
Benefits
With the ServiceChannel Service Automation deployment, the restaurant chain’s team could then implement, track and measure a number of key benefits to its FM operations including:
- Providing each restaurant manager complete transparency during the work order proposal stage
- Providing on-site restaurant staff the option to initiate, track and close work orders using desktop and mobile devices
- Communicating work order status within the FM team or with vendors through the platform
- Implementing a planned maintenance schedule for common, recurring services
- Enabling easier work order follow-up on progress, enabling faster issue time-to-resolution
- Enhancing data and reporting to identify spending trends as well as anomalies and outliers
- Integrating with the corporate accounting system to eliminate redundancy and errors in invoicing and payment
- Making the FM team’s work and achievements more transparent to management and other corporate departments
Results
The chain’s FM team has also realized a number of quantifiable benefits by using ServiceChannel. It can now measure key performance indicators to evaluate its own performance as well as its 125+ vendors nationally. Some KPI highlights for a one-year span include:
- 246% improvement in quality of service (work order feedback rated as “excellent or satisfactory”)
- 44% reduction in average work order resolution time (measured in days)
- 30% increase in vendor on-time arrival rate
- 12% increase in first-time work order completion rate
