Creating the perfect customer experience while innovating in-store experiences can be difficult, especially under budget constraints and competing business priorities.

Without easy access to facilities and asset data, many capital planners in the retail industry do not have the information they need to carve out dollars for store innovations and improvements to deliver a better customer experience.

With disparate processes for facilities management and capital planning, organizations find that most maintenance systems do not provide an adequate level of visibility. The facilities management and capital planning teams are using different technologies that prevent the two departments from properly communicating information.

This lack of communication has negative consequences, including the inability of capital planners to prioritize urgent projects and accurately plan and forecast based on facilities and asset data.

To combat these issues, there are multiple factors that need to be considered:

  • Conditions of existing facilities and assets.
  • Priorities across various business units.
  • Prioritization of certain facilities and assets that must be repaired or replaced.

The ability to gather asset condition information, while understanding organizational prioritization, and where key innovation spend should come from is essential. This capability is facilitated by the integration between Accruent’s maintenance and capital planning systems.

Create multi-year cost forecasts.

In order to make informed decisions about physical assets, facility managers conduct site audits to capture information about the condition of assets. However, this information is often stored in a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) that is utilized only by the facilities management team. This information is extremely valuable to the capital planning team that is deciding where to allocate spend in both the short-term and the long-term.

With the integration of Accruent’s capital planning and maintenance solutions, companies can create multi-year cost forecasts based on site and asset data, leveraging existing information to provide insight into future spending needs. This approach ensures that mission-critical information is not overlooked, when organizations determine which facilities get upgraded and innovated year over year.

Track forecast vs. actual spend.

By integrating our capital planning and maintenance solutions, capital planners can track spending efficiency by directly comparing forecasted expenditures to the actual amounts spent. Forecasts show actual spend versus planned as work is completed, letting planners track spend to plan effectively and hold teams accountable for their project budgets.

Gather asset condition data.

Asset data from surveys and field workflows can be utilized across systems, ensuring an accurate view of asset conditions.

As a result, both capital planners and facilities managers can:

  • Gain a clear understanding of their assets.
  • Determine what may need to be repaired instead of replaced.
  • Know which repairs have already taken place.

Initiate work orders.

Quite often, capital planning teams struggle to communicate work orders effectively to facilities teams. If capital planners discover a problem, it can take days or weeks to report because they do not have access to create work orders in the CMMS platform. With Accruent, capital planners can initiate work orders in the CMMS based on the condition of an asset from a field survey, or a condition assessment itself, streamlining the management of lifecycle renewal.

Utilize maintenance data.

By allowing Accruent’s CMMS and capital planning solutions to communicate, create surveys and forecasts, and generate capital plans, companies can build a capital plan that addresses the enterprise’s most urgent needs. Rather than reacting to the squeaky wheels, organizations can use objective data to inform their capital plans, prioritize their spend, and drive the customer experience.

Get access to the facilities and asset data you need to drive the customer experience, contact us today!