The true cost of R&M includes factors beyond reactive repairs. Use these 5 strategies to reduce these costs and enhance the efficiency of your R&M teams.
When it comes to managing repair and maintenance (R&M) costs, it's essential to look beyond expenses for preventative maintenance and reactive repairs. The true cost of R&M includes factors like equipment downtime, labor expenses, overtime costs, and the capitalization of new equipment and major repairs.
However, by leveraging the right tools and strategies, you can significantly reduce these costs and enhance the efficiency of your R&M teams.
Here are five winning strategies to consider:
Minimize the need for external vendor services by empowering your in-house team to handle routine maintenance tasks and troubleshooting whenever possible. 86 Repairs enables this by collecting and maintaining accurate equipment inventories while prescribing troubleshooting workflows for assets like fryers and refrigerators. This not only saves on service fees but also reduces downtime waiting for external assistance.
Throughout 2023, the average restaurant saved almost $400 a month by preventing avoidable vendor dispatches with 86 Repairs. Whether you have an in-house team or not, having the right workflows and systems in place can produce meaningful savings.
Take full advantage of warranties for equipment and parts whenever applicable. Missed warranties can cost your group thousands without you knowing it. What’s more, warranties are commonly voided once work has been done on the equipment by non-authorized vendors.
86 Repairs makes proper tracking and management of warranties easy. Whenever tickets are submitted through 86 Repairs, the asset’s warranty is automatically checked, ensuring consistent verification and greatly reducing R&M costs.
Having visibility into what vendors in your area charge for similar work and how they perform takes a lot of data and ongoing tracking. Moreover, many vendor marketplaces and CMMS are built to benefit vendors—not the restaurants that need them. This can limit the vendors you can work with and increase invoice averages due to markups.
86 Repairs makes it easy to find and work with vendors of your choice, provides 100% price transparency, and never marks up invoices. Through vendor scoring and granular vendor performance insights, 86 Repairs customers can identify trends and anomalies in vendor pricing, ensuring they are getting fair and consistent rates.
Avoid the ticking time bombs across restaurant locations. There’s no better way to protect your budget than by being proactive in inspecting and servicing your most important equipment.
Major outages lead to costly replacements and downtime, which negatively impacts top-line revenue as well as employee and customer satisfaction. What’s more, not having a good preventative maintenance strategy in place can open groups up to safety and legal risks.
Important restaurant preventative maintenance tasks include, but are not limited to:
86 Repairs supports preventative maintenance execution in multiple ways. Restaurants can leverage self-administered preventative maintenance workflows through the platform at no additional cost, or they can engage in a premium preventative maintenance management service to take on the process of scheduling and executing all preventative maintenance tasks.
Historically, R&M is one of the least understood line items in the P&L. The cost of R&M sprawls well beyond the 2-4% that’s usually budgeted.
By gaining visibility into equipment inventories, ticket requests, vendor performance, costs, and details by location, you can quickly identify trends and gaps in procedures that could be costing your group five to six figures annually.
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86 Repairs offers specialized R&M management systems and services designed specifically for restaurant operators. Our platform simplifies vendor management, warranty tracking, and invoice reconciliation and provides valuable insights to optimize R&M budgets.
With flexible contract terms and tailored pricing options, 86 Repairs is here to support your restaurant group in minimizing R&M costs and maximizing operational efficiency.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your business thrive.
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