Ten Tips on How to Use a CMMS for Restaurant Maintenance

Great food, fast service, and a pleasant ambiance are marks of a successful restaurant, in the eyes of patrons and management. However, restaurant maintenance issues, often hidden, are critical to creating all of those positive customer experiences. Those establishments that take maintenance issues seriously should implement a CMMS solution. Such a system will significantly streamline repairs and other maintenance issues, contributing to the eatery’s bottom line. Here are ten tips on how to use a CMMS for restaurant maintenance.

1. Respond Swiftly to Reactive Maintenance Issues

Reactive maintenance is part of every restaurant owner’s life. Kitchen assets will malfunction, dining room furnishings will need repair, and HVAC equipment will break down. It’s important to address maintenance issues that affect the customer experience immediately. Use a mobile CMMS app to allow any restaurant team member to report a reactive or emergency maintenance issue. The order can be sent to the maintenance technician or management right away for priority action.

2. Schedule Preventive Maintenance Tasks

Preventive maintenance is always less expensive and less stressful than emergency repairs. Use a CMMS solution to help you take care of your critical kitchen assets. For example, be sure you descale your appliances regularly. Schedule cleaning, inspecting, and maintaining of key equipment regularly, including your freezers and refrigeration units. After all, a malfunction of one of those critical assets could affect your customers or close your restaurant.

3. Manage Maintenance Budget

As you look at your expenses and revenue for a particular period, a CMMS can help you track and monitor your maintenance budget. The more accounting data you can collect, the better you’ll understand how much repairs and maintenance will cost. You can also analyze the cost of an in-house technician vs. using outside contractors on an as-needed basis.

4. Coordinate Outside Vendors

A CMMS solution allows you to store and manage everything from third-party vendor quotes and contracts to ongoing charges and discounts. Having all this information in one location can make historic analysis and comparing vendor performance and prices a breeze.

5. Compare Maintenance Costs With Industry Standards

According to the Restaurant Facility Management Association, most restaurants budget one percent to three percent of revenue for maintenance and repair. A CMMS solution can help you calculate how much of your sales go to maintenance and compare your spending with other similar restaurants in your industry. Also, your CMMS software synthesizes work order cost tracking data to help illuminate areas for improvement.

6. Use Data to Choose Repair or Replacement

Over time, you can use your historic CMMS data to decide which pieces of equipment are costing you too much money for ongoing repairs. This information can help you determine the best time to replace critical assets with new ones. You may be able to take into account things like increased capacity and energy efficiency of new equipment to justify the expenditure.

7. Generate Automatic Work Orders

Whether you’re addressing an emergency issue or scheduling preventive maintenance, a CMMS can help generate work orders in priority order. In addition, if you’re running multiple restaurant locations, a CMMS can help you coordinate maintenance activities efficiently and manage work orders. For example, all repairs in one location can be scheduled for a single technician. A CMMS can also help plan the most efficient routes for a specialty technician traveling between locations, and overall revolutionize your work order process.

8. Provide Transparency Into Repair Progress

Management can gain transparency into the entire maintenance process by seeing exactly who is repairing or servicing equipment and when changes are made. This information can be used to generate reports, which allow management to make better overall business decisions in the long term.

9. Improve Communication

Management, kitchen staff, and servers may all be allowed to enter maintenance issues into a CMMS app. Since all the information is in one location, it becomes easy to track the progress of work orders. Such a system reduces the concern that requests have been forgotten or prioritized incorrectly. Curious requesters can easily see what progress has been made on their particular issue.

10. Increase Accountability

Since a CMMS can track who is doing what when, management can easily see if a particular technician is not following through. In addition, problems may be headed off more quickly. For example, if a technician cannot access needed parts or repair equipment, these can be ordered by the purchasing coordinator.