How Facilities Management Professionals Can Benefit from R&M Solutions

You have top-of-the-line talent leading your in-house facilities management team. How could you possibly benefit from an additional solution for repairs and maintenance (R&M) management? 

This may surprise you, but the right R&M solution can help your in-house team better manage their processes and deliverables while providing valuable insights into the many areas they are responsible for owning and measuring. 

Here’s a closer look at how facilities management professionals (and their in-house teams) can benefit from R&M solutions. 

The Facilities Management Case for an R&M Solution

Flag opportunities for cost savings

Picture this: a full, detailed inventory of all your restaurant equipment accompanied by the repair history (and cost) of service work for each asset. It may sound like the dream for facilities management, but it could actually be your reality. 

The right R&M solution will comprehensively catalog every asset your team could possibly service—from your fryers, to your reach-in refrigeration, to your HVAC system, and beyond. It will serve as a single source of truth for the following details for every asset:

• Warranty coverage
• Serial number  
• Service history
• Service providers used (whether in-house or third party)
• Logged invoices 
• Repair vs. replace price comparisons

A great R&M management solution is a critical resource for enhancing operational processes, helping facilities teams make better, faster decisions. 

When the walk-in refrigerator is temping too high at one of your managed locations, it’s a drop-everything-and-deal-with-it emergency. Odds are the refrigerator has thousands of dollars of perishable food inside. 

How nice would it be to get a proactive notification for that fridge that helps your facilities and frontline teams identify warranty eligibility and run asset-specific troubleshooting?

These time and cost savings add up quickly. In fact, 86 Repairs customers saved a combined 18.6% on dispatch avoidance through troubleshooting and warranty coverage in 2024.

A solution that surfaces these types of savings and preventative measures can help facilities managers stay focused on preventative maintenance and bigger picture priorities rather than getting pulled into the frey of emergency repairs. 

Check out our 2025 State of Repairs report for a best-in-class R&M standards checklist, along with equipment manufacturer performance insights and more. 

Show your work

Job security is a beautiful thing, and it’s easy to demonstrate the value of you and your team's contributions if you have a simple, reliable way to capture your return on investment (ROI). 

A great R&M management solution actually helps you show your work! Here are a couple of details you can track and report on for company stakeholders:

• How many service requests you (and your team) have managed
• If you have in-house technicians, what the repair workload would cost if multiplied by the average cost of dispatching third-party vendors for that same service (which then shows what you saved by keeping this in-house) 
• How much you have been able to reduce downtime by efficiently moving the repairs process forward
• How you have optimized your service company mix based on evaluation of your service provider network 
• How have you been able to do more with less–being more efficient because you have the right R&M tools

The hospitality industry isn’t for the faint of heart; every day brings multiple demands on your time and attention. Identify digital resources that offload some of the background work of logging and tracking your service costs. 

Identify your lemons

As with motor vehicles, sometimes the issue is with the manufactured product vs.the servicing of that product. Consider an R&M management solution that notifies you and your team when an item has had excess repair work within a short period of time. 

For example, if your gas range has required technician dispatch more than 3 times within a 90-day timeframe, you run the risk of spending more than the equipment’s value on repair work. It’s time to consider replacement vs. repair. 

Your R&M management solution should make it easy to capture service history, removing that burden from the managers on duty and general managers getting pulled in several other directions at once. 

A consistent solution for keeping tabs on what service has been applied to which equipment makes your life easier, simplifies your needs from other teammates, and helps surface significant opportunities for cost savings. 

Improve your projected spend and forecasting

Data insights are a huge benefit of a digital system that logs and analyzes real invoices and work orders. Here are some of the decisions you can make with more confidence when you have the numbers to back them: 

• Projected spend and fiscal forecasting for repairs and equipment replacement
• How many technicians you need on staff in order to manage the average volume of open service requests for your restaurants
• Which external service providers are performing the best, and how to optimize your service provider mix
• Opportunities for cost savings through preventative maintenance, troubleshooting and warranty coverage 
• Which pieces of aging equipment are up next for replacement 
• What brands of equipment perform best and reliably for you over time

With the right insights, you may not be predicting the future, but you’ll certainly be ready for it. 

Time for a system review?

You didn’t land your facilities management leadership role through luck alone. Keeping multi-unit restaurants up and running is hard work! 

Don’t make your job harder than it has to be. Take a look at the R&M management solution you have in place today and consider whether it delivers the support and insights you need to maximize your efforts in driving operational uptime for your restaurants. 

We’d love to connect with you to discuss your R&M needs. Let’s find time to chat.