The Retail Industry is More Dynamic Than Ever
Retailers nationwide are reinvesting in their footprint — upgrading stores to better serve the needs of customers, opening more locations to take advantage of new buying behaviors and strategies, and strengthening their brands based on learnings from the pandemic era. As online and in-store sales continue to merge and shift, it’s clear that the facilities themselves will remain essential focal points of a larger sales strategy — underscoring the need for consistent retail facility maintenance.
This maintenance isn’t intended only to deliver a positive customer experience — it’s also essential to your operational and financial performance. Each retail store has a wealth of assets (HVAC/R, lighting, signage, fire-life safety systems, and more) that keep it functional. And each of those assets requires consistent maintenance to maximize their lifespan and value for the organization. The challenge today isn’t the maintenance itself — it’s how retail facility maintenance is planned, coordinated, executed, and measured.
What Great Retail Facility Maintenance Focuses on to Maximize Value
1. Planning
Whether you have a few dozen locations or a few hundred, retail facility maintenance is a CapEx function that must be thoroughly and proactively planned. Your facility management partner (or your in-house team) must have a seat at the table or at least provide proper forecasting to ensure a sufficient budget can be developed and allocated. This is particularly important for aging assets that may need proactive replacement before they fail (and cause even more financial headaches). Having a complete list of all assets across all locations will also be of significant strategic value in that you’ll know all the details of each location’s most critical assets and can plan maintenance or replacement accordingly.
- The power of a proactive approach: Don’t risk asset downtime — and thus customer satisfaction and sales — by not planning maintenance ahead of time.
2. Coordination
The key to effective retail facility maintenance is consistency. Achieving this with self-performers managed by separate locations is all but impossible. Additionally, different assets have various lead times across separate regions. These complexities can make managing a program in-house incredibly difficult, and yet store-level leadership likely won’t be able to manage it in an effective manner. Retailers should consider partnering with an aggregator with an established network of vendors. This higher-level oversight ensures that consistent scopes of work are performed at all locations and any asset replacements or installations are more strategically planned as opposed to being handled reactively.
- The aggregator advantage: Go deeper into aggregator facility management companies and the benefits of partnering with one over self-performers.
3. Measurement
You can plan and execute the most effective retail facility maintenance program possible, but it’s important to remember that FM is about making a bottom-line impact in addition to maintaining assets. Proactive maintenance and replacement of assets throughout your footprint maximizes uptime, mitigates unexpected costs, and gives you greater power over your FM spending because you’re the one driving — not individual locations and not asset failures that catch you unawares. If reporting on facility maintenance hasn’t been a priority or a capability, it’s time to make a change. A national facility management partner can assist you with setting up financial and operational reporting so you and other leaders can make the best decisions possible.
- Budget better with data: Learn how a proper facility management program helps you control and understand costs.
Take Your Retail Facility Maintenance from Reactive to Proactive
CLS Facility Services partners with major retail brands across the country. With more than five decades of experience in this industry and many others, our team helps you take your retail facility maintenance program to the next level — streamlining scopes of work, ensuring greater consistency, reducing costs, mitigating unexpected emergencies, and providing greater insight into all of your assets. Learn more about our capabilities here.
We work on nearly 20 distinct work order management systems and provide our own proprietary solution where needed — ensuring you’ll always be able to request support in the way that works best for you. With a highly tenured team and network of vendors from coast to coast, all of your facility maintenance needs will be expertly planned and executed, giving you peace of mind in knowing that you’re getting ahead.
Reach out now to discuss your facility management needs.
You can also book a meeting with us at a time that works best for you here.