National Grocery Chain

Customer Situation

The facilities team for a rapidly growing grocery store chain was looking for a comprehensive facilities management solution for a fleet of locations from manufacturing to assembly to retail.  Requirements for a granular approach to asset management was also a critical priority.  Automating facilities management invoice requirements by the class of trades, assets, and locations was an important attribute of an acceptable solution to meet the efficiency and effectiveness goals of the team which processes thousands of work orders each month.

The Challenge

The customer desired a facilities management solution that could address a sophisticated set of requirements for their diverse fleet of locations and support a range of asset management programs.  Additionally, they were seeking a future-proof solution that could grow with their rapidly growing business. 

Most Facilities Management solutions they had evaluated prior to finding Fexa offered very little flexibility to meet their demands for unique configurations and sophisticated automation.  Other vendors’ solutions forced them to process all invoices using a single template and workflow. Even with customizations, for which they would incur professional services fees, these workarounds did not enable them to manage each trade and type of location with the specificity to meet unique business requirements effectively.

The Fexa Solution

By selecting Fexa CMMS, they were able to meet their requirements by taking advantage of the platform's highly-adaptable smart workflow capabilities.  The Fexa solution gave them a platform with the right level of configuration flexibility to track and manage their diverse vendor community. By applying unique vendor invoicing workflows to each of their major classes of vendors, they could capture and track unique KPIs. Additionally, they were able to save significant time and money by automating business and regulatory compliance adherence rules with the appropriate level of granularity across each unique vendor class.

Customer Benefits

Soon after shifting to Fexa CMMS, the customer was able to successfully streamline vendor and asset management to boost uptime, optimize preventive maintenance, and reduce invoice processing time. Key benefits of their implementation included the ability to:

• Manage and track vendor and asset data that supports topline business goals by delivering significantly improved uptime for key revenue-generating assets.
• Capture valuable data for facilities and the engineering teams that can be used to analyze and refine Preventative Maintenance programs, and applied as part of Vendor Partner Quarterly Reviews.
• Eliminate wasted time in back and forth phone calls and emails between accounting, facilities, and vendors – reducing the overall time spent processing vendor invoices by 20 – 30%.
• Close accounting books each month in a matter of hours versus days with respect to overall facilities and equipment expenses.

Game Plan with Fexa

A variety of platform features were used to improve operational efficiency, streamline vendor management and improve management precision for high-value assets. Using Fexa, the organization was able to:

• Stratify their vendors into classes based on levels of complexity and identify all of the invoice and work-related compliance factors for each category.  
• Using Fexa’s Vendor Invoice Workflow Designer, design and automate facilities management invoice requirements to support unique workflow and applicable business rules for multiple vendor classes.
• Efficiently automate invoice compliance adherence with configurable business rules appropriate for each asset / trade classification.   Some examples include:
  • Window Cleaning/Janitorial.  Only require labor line items.
  • General Mechanical Trades.  Require invoices to be broken down into labor, materials, and equipment. 
  • Specialized Equipment Trades for unique high dollar assets.  Require invoices to be broken down into labor, materials, and equipment.  Require a standard  PM preventative maintenance checklist to be appended at invoice submission.
• Utilize Fexa’s Billing Requirements features to assure that no time is wasted upstream attempting to process invoices that have not met their business rules as defined in the various Vendor Invoice Workflow designs noted above.  
• Automate Exception Communications and Triggers based on timely alerts to the vendor of missing compliance items required prior to invoice submission being complete.
• Create video “refresher” training for vendors and insert key communications hyperlinks right in the vendor invoice screens to eliminate confusion or any back and forth phone calls when a new vendor or technician is engaged.
• Utilize strategic custom fields, specifically requested by the specialized in-house engineering team to easily track and automate the delivery of reports that provide timely information at a more granular level on all preventative and reactive maintenance for key assets within their Specialized Equipment classes.
• Automate an accounting accrual report to be delivered to accounting monthly to manage the very high dollar pending invoices according to their policies and procedures.