Here are Five Quick Tips for Leaders in Quick Service Restaurant Facilities Management

We know you and your team are busy, so we won’t make you scroll for miles before we get to the point. Here’s what you came here to find out. We hope it’s helpful — if you want to connect to discuss these points in detail, get in touch with us here.

  1. Consolidate your service vendors — This is probably one of your greatest frustrations as a facility leader. With many locations come many commercial service vendors to provide support across various facility trades. Extensive paperwork, communication effort, coordination, etc. — it’s a lot for one team to handle. As part of your annual strategic plan, consider dedicating time and resources toward consolidation.
  2. Build an asset database — Every location throughout your footprint has numerous assets, each with a variety of data points and model numbers that must be known, stored, and occasionally looked up for maintenance needs. More importantly, knowing those assets’ age, performance histories, and associated costs can help to inform future replacement decisions. Building a complete database of all asset information that is accessible at any time will go a long way in helping with quick serve restaurant facilities management.
  3. Take a CapEx approach to replacements — It’s like that each location is required to pay for large asset replacements, such as new HVAC systems. When these situations arise, those expenses can throw off OpEx budgets significantly. It’s better to pay for those replacements proactively using data from the above database — and funding from CapEx budgets. This allows those costs to be spread out over time and frees up OpEx budgets for other priorities.
  4. Focus on vendor performance — While it can be challenging to pay attention to vendor performance over time, particularly if you’re handling quick serve restaurant facilities management internally with a limited team, it’s still an important function. While one-off issues are common, what matters is when a service vendor is consistently failing to meet the mark. The location suffers, budgets suffer, and your team has to find a new vendor. Monitoring vendor performance KPIs over time will help you identify where changes must be made.
  5. Drive toward work scope uniformity — Closely related to the above is ensuring that scopes of work, regardless of the vendor doing it, are made uniform. This means that the work to be done, the materials and supplies needed, the associated costs, and the expected timeframes for completing it are all consistent — regardless of location. This can be challenging when working with different vendors, as you’re often at the mercy of what the company will do (this is particularly true when it’s a short notice service call or emergency, and you just need something to be done). But driving toward consistency will help you keep budgets manageable and always know what you should be getting.

Now, If You Want to Know Why All of This Matters, Keep Reading

We mentioned this a few times in each item, but the challenge facing facility leaders and their teams today is the difficulty in handling all of this on your own — and while trying to support other organizational goals.

Every maintenance issue that your team experiences means less time supporting those goals and instead devoting hours of their day to finding vendors, making calls, sending emails, communicating with site managers, following up for documentation, and more.

The most ideal solution to this is using an aggregator to manage facility asset maintenance for you. Rather than your team working with separate self-performing service vendors across your coverage area, partnering with an aggregator means all of the daily asset maintenance needs your team handles — as well as the five key considerations above — are handled exclusively by another team.

The advantages of working with an aggregator are many, but just a few include:

  • Efficient consolidation of commercial service vendors
  • Less administrative hassle and burden on your team
  • Your team can devote more focus to strategic priorities
  • Uniform work scopes across all of your locations
  • Reliable, centralized communication with a proven team
  • Flexibility to work in a variety of work order management systems
  • And many, many more

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