Facilities Management Tools Your Store Managers Will Love

When facilities management tools are helpful and easy to use, they get the job done more efficiently and make store and location managers into big fans of the facilities management team!

Getting facilities management and maintenance work done requires a community working together. The goal is to get to the end result – work and a job well done to support the location, the brand, and the business. When facilities management tools are helpful and easy to use, they get the job done more efficiently and make store and location managers into big fans of the facilities management team!

For any user to fully adopt and embrace facilities management tools, they must feel that they get what they uniquely need from the solution. Ease of use is a crucial focus for our Fexa solution. We intentionally build features specific to each of the different roles across the facilities management community required to get work completed. We know that when adoption is higher, efficiency and savings will follow.

Store managers and location personnel have a vital role in the value chain of getting excellent facilities work done. When the only value of using a software tool is that its use is mandated, there will always be challenges. Conversely, tools that provide value for the user will be embraced and make a difference in the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the business. 

Key Features that Make CMMS “Loveable” for Store Managers.

Facilities leaders and their team members tend to live in their CMMS software solution much of their workday, and into weekends and evenings even! They are most effective when in their “zone” knocking out tasks, making decisions, and planning and optimizing things to keep their function running smoothly.  

Store managers or other location-based personnel do NOT live in the CMMS. They are busy attending to customers, managing incoming inventory, making staffing decisions, training new staff, and so much more. But when their site has a repair issue, they need to do their part to alert the facilities team and initiate the work. 

Here are just some of the ways that a well-designed facilities management solution can help the store managers:

Make it easy to initiate work.

Dashboards and views that are designed just for the busy store manager (available on desktop or mobile) give them only the fields and info they need (no more, no less) to initiate a request.

Help them save time.

Give them an intuitive, modern software design that enables them to get help or search for things as natural as a google search or click of a button.

Communicate status with them in a timely and user-friendly way.

Using automated, proactive status updates sent to their channel of choice – email, SMS, other – is both reassuring in that they know help is on the way and convenient when delivered on the right channel for their preferences.

Ask for their feedback and input.

Give them a means to quickly provide feedback using simple thumbs up/thumbs down ratings. You can always also offer options for them to share more upon confirming work completion. (And save time for yourself by implementing smart sentiment analysis so you, the facilities team, can quickly get involved if there are issues).

That “Loveable” CMMS Also Makes the Facilities Teams More Efficient.

For facilities managers, a solution that addresses the above for their store based stakeholders saves them time, money, and leads to getting quality work done efficiently.  By providing the user-centric features noted above, facilities teams can manage the myriad of tasks and projects they are juggling while enhancing their relationships with their internal customers by:

• Eliminating need to field frequent calls from stores – either for help or as a workaround to using the system;
• Automating communications to keep everyone informed without swivel chair requirements to go from CMMS to email to phone.
• Getting timely notification when repair work is required, versus creating unnecessary emergencies because of lost time getting the work order initiated in the first place.
• Gleaning real insights from more real-time feedback regarding work quality that they can use in managing and coaching their providers.

Fexa can do that?

While many of these items seem like evident and straightforward requirements, we often hear from new customers that Fexa’s implementation of these features is a welcome change from prior solutions. When bringing on a new customer, we love it when they exclaim, “Fexa can do that?” And this happens a lot! Frequently, these expressions of joy come when the facilities team realizes that Fexa can help how they work with the store and location teams. We would love to show you more!

Reach out and let us know your opportunities in enhancing the central to store relationships to get good work done!