For retailers to drive innovation and improve the customer experience, their processes must be seamless. Departments must be able to talk to each other and information must be shared across the business to prevent miscommunications that cause delays and create problems for the customer.
According to IDC, “Customer experience is the trigger of retail innovation. It is the focal point of a new way of doing business for retailers, with an individualized value proposition at the core merging physical and digital experiences.” In fact, 80% of retailers surveyed by IDC felt “urgency to realign business model for customer experience”1.
To help our customers better plan for the future of their businesses, Accruent is taking our flagship products in facilities management and real estate and adding key functionality and integrations to help them continue to innovate. This new functionality allows retailers to improve the in-store experience, keep customers engaged with their brand, and carve out the dollars for innovative projects that drive a fresh customer experience.
Accruent Platform Integrations
Real Estate and Facilities Management
Real estate teams and facilities management teams often struggle to communicate about lease obligations, causing delays and routing errors that impact customers in their stores. Many retailers are wasting time and money on work orders that their landlords should be handling. This lack of visibility can cost retailers tens of thousands of dollars in additional maintenance costs per year, and cause days of delays when fixing critical equipment like HVAC, lighting, or roofing. By integrating our Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) and lease administration and accounting solutions, retailers can see work orders, where they need to be routed, and dispatched quickly to get the problem fixed.
Facilities Management and Capital Planning Departments
Typically, capital planning departments work apart from the facilities management team. This separation means that the capital planning group can make the wrong assumptions about the facilities data and include unneeded items in the capital plan. These mistakes hurt retailers that are trying to balance multiple objectives – from improving customer experience, renovating stores, and making key repairs to various sites in both the short term and the long term. By integrating our CMMS platform and capital planning platform, retailers can leverage existing data to develop capital plans and programs team that drive meaningful change.
Engineering Documentation and Facilities Management
When engineering documentation is not updated properly across an organization, things can go catastrophically wrong. If water pipes, outlets and wires are moved, or walls are taken down, the documentation for the facilities management team must be updated accordingly. Otherwise, workers can get hurt, or routine work orders can get delayed.. Important work orders or promised store openings can be delayed significantly due to improper documentation. These delays can be avoided by the integration between our CMMS and our Engineering Documentation Management solutions to reduce documentation confusion and ensure our customers can open stores on-time and keep stores running optimally.
Ready to reinvent your customer experience? Get in touch with Accruent.
Key Functionality Upgrades
With key functionality upgrades that assist facilities managers, real estate professionals, and engineers, retailers can become more efficient with Accruent’s platforms.
We are now including usage-based rent functionality in our lease administration and accounting solutions. In general, retailers pay their rent based on percentage of sales or based on their use of units or the times pieces of equipment or space is used. As variable rent payments continue to evolve, Accruent’s lease solution is expanding its payment processing to include units sold and units consumed.
Creating visibility throughout our documentation processes
Accruent’s Contracts Document Management allows users to view documents without having the applications installed on their computers. There are also markup tools, collaboration tools, and new, supported file types such as CAD drawings.
Easily track your work from start to finish
Performing a work order is no longer the extended, monotonous process that it once was. Organizations want additional visibility and easy, in-app views to show the status of their work orders and where issues are located within their business. Users will gain visibility into a work order as it progresses, rather than waiting to view it once completed.
Filter out noise
We can filter out additional alarm noise before flagged conditions generate a work order and send a technician to the site, increasing visibility across enterprises at various levels.
How Accruent Can Help
As the retail industry continues to evolve, Accruent, as a global solution provider, can serve customers from asset inception to disposition, while giving organizations full visibility into their facilities management, real estate lifecycle, and physical resource management.
Today, more than half of the top 100 retailers have chosen Accruent to help them manage key aspects of their business.
Businesses must run smoothly to achieve their mission. Accruent is helping to create more efficiencies and break down internal silos to save organizations money, increase staff productivity, and drive value for our customers.
Create more efficiencies and break down silos. Contact Accruent today!
1Experience-Based Business Models: Results from the IDC Retail Innovation Survey 2018, IDC, June 2018
