The importance of facilities technology
The impact of facilities technology across your business
Selecting the right technology partner
Building the business case
Executing a successful transformation process
This comprehensive guide is designed to help facilities leaders and executives in operations, procurement, real estate, and finance understand the value of facilities management software. It will help you learn how to choose the right partner based on your needs, build a business case that resonates with company leaders, and ensure a successful transformation during implementation and go-live.
Watch Part 1 Video: Hear from Sid Shetty, CBDO at ServiceChannel, on why facilities management technology is so important to the success of today’s leading brands.
Facilities management has never been more critical to the success of a brand. Here’s why:
To address these challenges and create a competitive advantage, leading retail, restaurant, grocery, healthcare, convenience store, and other consumer-facing brands leverage facilities management (FM) software that delivers business value across the entire organization.
Historically, brick and mortar locations have been managed by reactive facilities programs that — at their best — just tracked open work orders and replaced failed equipment.
But today, top-performing facilities managers and store operators use technology to streamline processes and improve operational and brand performance. Leaders with better visibility into their locations, assets, and service providers can proactively find savings and operational efficiencies as their business grows. They achieve this by benchmarking spend and performance against industry averages, uncovering hidden costs, and creating more accurate forecasts.
The right facilities software can help you maximize brand uptime at scale, drive efficient and strategic deployment of budget and resources across global locations, and support the goals of stakeholders across the facilities, operations and finance functions.
While some vendors can improve compliance and staff productivity, the best technology provides data-driven insights across key business functions, resulting in significant benefits like those shown here.
Watch Part 2 Video: Hear from Deb Millette, Director of Solution Consultants, about how facilities technology brings value across key functions in your business.
Whether your brick-and-mortar locations are running effectively impacts your entire business. A data-driven software platform for facilities management can elevate key business functions, from operations to finance, construction to sales. Here are just a few examples.
Poor equipment conditions or downtime prevent locations from delivering quality guest experiences, resulting in lost sales and negative brand impressions.
Solution
FM software enables faster and more reliable issue resolution, keeps locations and assets performing optimally, and allows for better maintenance and inventory management of parts and supplies.
On-site staff must meet the high expectations and needs of customers, while avoiding distractions caused by lingering facilities problems or the need to chase down providers to get work done.
Solution
With more historical data on equipment and service providers, operations teams have the insights they need to make better decisions on repairs and replacements, hold providers accountable, and save time and reduce expenses in the long run.
Projecting accurate budget forecasts is always a challenge for finance teams, especially in organizations where reporting is fragmented.
Solution
FM software helps finance teams understand and control facilities costs. Analytics make it easier to identify outlier expenses that cause P&L surprises.
Inability to justify capital investments in new assets leads to excessive downtime and unnecessary operating costs from legacy assets.
Solution
FM software provides insights on aging assets, allowing for prioritization of capital investments to maximize total cost of ownership. This benefits operating profit/EBITDA by reducing wasted R&M spend.
Finding cost savings and P&L efficiencies is hard when you don’t have much visibility into your R&M spending.
Solution
FM software provides full visibility into capital expenses, benchmarks areas for optimization, and prevents overpayment for incomplete work.
Optimizing for total cost of ownership down the road is challenging when building new stores and locations. This includes making design decisions and capital investments based on predicted lifetime value and ongoing R&M expenses.
Solution
FM software collects R&M data over time to accurately forecast costs, enabling strategic underwriting and cutting wasted costs for better ROI.
It’s not easy to justify budgets as you scale your FM programs across locations without showing impact.
Solution
Real estate leaders can leverage historical FM data to figure out why a location is overspending on R&M and how to cut wasted expenses on their P&L.
Facilities teams often lack headcount and sufficient resources to operate FM workload on their own, which can lead to being reactive and inefficient with growing backlog of service requests and maintenance issues, more downtime, and higher costs.
Solution
With routine requests and preventative maintenance automated, facilities teams can focus on being more strategic, spending their time mostly on the small percent of high priority issues that require special attention. A robust partner can also help achieve desired results with fully managed services.
Facilities leaders struggle to defend their budgets and prove the value of their work to company leaders.
Solution
With greater visibility into their operations, facilities teams can be more proactive in how they approach capital planning, including demonstrating impact and cutting wasteful spending.
Watch Part 3 Video: Hear from Chris Zach, Director of Product Marketing, on how to select the right facilities management technology partner.
While there are many basic Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) platforms available to manage facilities operations, many are just a step or two above paper and clipboards.
To compete in the fast pace of today’s market, you’ll want a platform that leverages data and provides actionable insights, so you can run a proactive rather than reactive program.
Working with the right team during and after implementation is as important, if not more so, than the features and functions of the software itself. Look for a partner, not just a vendor. A strong partner will ensure easy, successful implementation with the help of a dedicated customer success team. They will work with you to achieve your goals and provide you the tools you need to be successful — and also help ensure you have high adoption. In fact, today’s leading facilities management professionals view their software vendor as a key partner in their success.
Important criteria to consider when evaluating FM software:
Company history of product success and marketplace credibility.
Trusted and endorsed by leading brands.
Proven track record of scaling a diverse range of organizations with locations ranging from under 10 to more than 10,000.
Full range of solutions and services to augment client’s existing resources. Ability to go beyond basic ticketing to being proactive with automation and insights, cost control, and brand preservation.
Full implementation support, scalability, and ongoing solutions upgrades with a customer success team.
Tenured facilities experience across vertical sectors and trades, not just in sales but professionally across the organization.
When investing in new FM software, consider the total cost of ownership. Some platforms that offer less upfront costs will make you pay many times over with extra time spent trying to implement, optimize, and reconfigure their system, especially if you outgrow them. As you expand more locations and improve your facilities performance, simple CMMS vendors won’t keep up with advanced features needed to help you scale your FM program.
Instead, evaluate which platform will provide the greatest long-term benefits and cost savings by anticipating your future needs.
Consider requesting an ROI analysis from each platform to estimate how much dollar value your investment will bring to your company.
Watch Part 4 Video: Hear from Derek Vipond, Sr. Director of Sales, about how to build a world-class business case.
Companies trying to preserve cash by withholding the necessary budget for facilities will inevitably lean on reactive repairs, suffering the consequences of increased downtime and unkempt appearance. Because the stakeholders that make decisions about your budget in an enterprise or commercial business respond better to value selling and data showing an investment is well spent, you should work to communicate to decision makers that investments in facilities is a straight line to taking care of your customers and achieving their business goals.
This is why it helps to have a software partner with useful data insights from industry peers to make the case for more budget. We’ll show you next how to create a strong business case or proposal to your leadership.
When asking for investment in new software, leadership needs to feel confident that you’ve considered the full impact of your proposal, including implementation and ongoing administration. You should also show what the alternative options may be and why you’ve chosen this path.
Be sure you include the following:
Senior decision-makers typically want to see total costs for:
Request an ROI model from the vendor specific to your industry that includes the following:
Check for an ROI calculator on the platform’s website.
Communicate with facilities, operations, finance, and real estate leaders before submitting the business case so they’re aware of the initiative and can help identify blind spots.
Confirm all contributors agree on what your proposal is.
To make these steps easier to follow, the ServiceChannel Business Case Template can get you started.
You probably know that when you propose new ideas for initiatives or investments that there will inevitably be pushback. Here are some common objections from executive committees and how to handle them.
“We don’t have the budget for that.”
Answer:
“Fortunately, the solution will pay for itself. With our potential partner and using our own numbers, we’ve projected $X in annual R&M savings and X hours saved by our onsite staff. We’ve also prepared a business case that breaks down the total long-term costs of this solution in comparison to our existing system, which is much higher.”
“Switching systems takes too long and is too much effort. We’re comfortable with the way things are.”
Answer:
“I understand your hesitation since switching systems can seem can be laborious. Luckily, the partner we’ve chosen has full scale implementation support and a dedicated customer success team that can help us develop a clear 90-day launch plan that covers data migration and training in a way that won’t disrupt our customer experience. Plus, they have a proven track record of successfully doing this with other companies in our industry.”
“We don’t have time to work with you on this right now. There are other priorities.”
Answer:
“I know time and money are tight but I believe you’ll be surprised by how much this will benefit other departments and leaders across our organization. Many of them already agree this solution will solve challenges for them too, both inside and outside facilities. For instance, we’ll have more control of our capital budgets, reduce downtime of critical assets that affect our revenue, and gain more accurate financial reporting for our annual P&Ls.”
Watch Part 5 Video: Hear from Erika Young, Manager of Implementation Services, on some tips and best practices for a successful onboarding and go-live.
A company needs to collect and have available all its data on locations, assets, providers, and other information that needs to be inputted in the new software. For assets, for example, customers will need Location, Tag ID, Brand, Model No., Serial No., Install Date, Condition, and Asset Tag. Depending on your situation, migration can be done either manually or by moving the information from existing excel spreadsheets in batches.
Generally, your software partner should provide training. For instance, ServiceChannel provides 12 hours of product immersion training, along with two or three sessions of end user location training lasting 90 minutes each. Provider training is rolling and conducted by a dedicated provider trainer as they are accepted into your private network.
In general, a custom FM system implementation takes 90 days from kickoff to go-live. Rapid onboarding can be completed sooner but with zero customization or support for the system, meaning standard issue list, minimum training, and little support on PM and assets.
Potential Slowdown: Companies that don’t have ready access to their location, user, and provider data can find overall time to production take longer as information is collected. So, it’s essential to have the right departments involved early to get access to that data and avoid delays.
Realizing the benefits of a new FM system requires time and focus. User adoption is often the biggest challenge even if existing processes are highly inefficient and costly, because some people naturally resist change.
Often this is because location-based staff haven’t been fully trained or learned all the benefits to them from new technology, which can lead to them not following new procedures or reverting to old systems.
For this reason, the client point of contact needs to prioritize early education for their teams to show what they’re purchasing and what the efforts are for.
Set Expectations Early
Set the tone early that use of the new platform is a non-negotiable expectation and that it’s here to stay. Involve users and management from the very beginning, listen to their concerns and pushbacks, address them, and put their representatives on your implementation team to help gain buy-in.
Observe and Learn from Early Lessons
Visit a few locations to see where challenges are encountered as on-site managers go through new processes. Ask those using the system what helped them get on board and highlight their success to their peers.
Continuously Provide Training and Support to Users
Offer additional training, support, and information on why the FM software is critical to the success of your facilities teams and provider networks to ensure they’re using the software effectively and maximizing its potential.
Leverage the Customer Success Team
Regularly engage with your customer success team in ongoing business reviews to stay up to date on new developments, update your FM processes, know where your system is providing value, and how to get more out of it.
Share greater visibility in leadership meetings with custom reports and dashboards to show how your facilities are performing, achieving KPIs, and making improvements.
Be Proactive with Data Analytics
As you accumulate data, measure what impacts your brand the most. Monitor performance and spend on locations and assets. Conduct root-cause analysis of costly areas of your operations to identify potential efficiency increases and/or cost-savings. And ultimately, make decisions backed by strategic insights to optimize your budget’s impact.
ServiceChannel brings peace of mind to facilities and store operations teams by ensuring that their locations offer the best possible guest and employee experience. Market leaders across industries partner with us to accelerate the performance of their business-critical assets. We make this possible through a SaaS platform that provides a single source of truth, a marketplace that connects businesses with top service providers, and professionally managed services.
Source top performers from the world’s largest service provider network of 70,000 providers across 63 countries.
Go-live support and guidance from customer success teams backed by 500+ years of total facilities experience.
Re-investing more than $25M annually in R&D to define the facilities tech frontier.
With productivity from automation, customers routinely operate over 400 locations per facilities manager.
Proven to scale with the world’s largest portfolios from organizations with under 10 locations to more than 10,000.
Go beyond basic ticketing to proactive automation and insights, cost controls, site audits, and decision tree tools that you’ll never outgrow.
Retail
Restaurants
Convenience Stores
Educational Institutions
Grocery Stores
and Supermarkets
Financial Institutions,
Banks, Credit Unions
Healthcare, Urgent Care,
and Vet Clinics
Work with us to quantify the value benefits and ROI of our solution to your business, so you can make a compelling case for investment with your stakeholders.
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