By Veronica Wallace, Contributor
While many industries have been affected by COVID-19, it can be readily argued the restaurant industry was one of the most profoundly affected. In many places, almost all business has transitioned to delivery and courier services -- not always to the great benefit of the restaurant.
It is under this lens of rapidly changing priorities and seismic shifts in the industry that we’ll examine how computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) might be useful to your restaurant:
What is a Restaurant CMMS?
A CMMS is a piece of restaurant maintenance software designed to help you track and maintain inventory and assets. It’s often sold as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), meaning you’ll have to pay a monthly or yearly fee in order to access your CMMS. There are a wide variety of different CMMS available on the market. A CMMS may help manage a number of things in your restaurant, including:
Assets and inventory
Spare parts
Preventive maintenance
Work orders
By their nature, CMMS tend to produce greater return on investment the larger your operation is. The more things you have to manage, the more worthwhile automated management systems of any kind become.
Thus, a CMMS will tend to work best for owners of multiple restaurants - they’re very commonly used by franchise owners. Nonetheless, owners of a few or even a single restaurant may benefit from a CMMS, depending on the size, scope, and ambition of the business.
Restaurant Asset & Inventory Management
Hopefully, you already have some form of inventory management in place for your restaurant. However, they’re much more user-friendly and far less time consuming than spreadsheets or pen and paper.
The asset and inventory management features of a CMMS are designed to help you manage assets and inventory that need to be maintained and repaired. These might include:
HVAC
Ranges and other cooking equipment
POS hardware
Refrigeration
You might be leery about getting software to manage your inventory during an economic downturn. For most restaurants, such assets are being used less, not more, so maintenance management may not be at the forefront of your concerns.
There is, however, some equipment that’s being used more frequently in the present time -- your fleet. Not every restaurant offers in-house delivery, but those who do are generally seeing an increase in the volume of deliveries they are making. Some have even expanded their delivery fleet. As a consequence, CMMS can be particularly useful, as it can help you determine
The locations of the cars in your fleet (if they move from restaurant to restaurant)
When you should send those vehicles in for preventive maintenance
The estimated lifespan of a given vehicle
There are many more things a CMMS can do to improve fleet management, and they’ll be described below:
Preventive Maintenance
One of the more useful features of a CMMS is preventive maintenance management. At its simplest, preventive maintenance management automatically schedules and assigns preventive upkeep. A wide variety of activities fall under this category, from cleaning the grease traps to changing the oil of a car in your fleet.
A more robust CMMS might provide an algorithm to help you determine when your assets should be maintained. You might also be able to schedule maintenance based on a wide variety of triggers, from how many days of use the asset has seen, to unexpected changes in the asset’s state (a refrigerator no longer maintaining its temperature).
Such preventive maintenance management might be particularly useful right now, given that regularly scheduled maintenance has been disrupted. For example, a grease trap that used to be cleaned on a monthly basis may no longer need such regular maintenance. Instead of time-based maintenance triggers, usage-based and condition-based maintenance triggers can help restaurants save money. These are easier to track with a CMMS.
Work Orders
Work order management is useful for restaurants who have a relatively large in-house repair and janitorial staff. When repairs are needed, a light bulb goes out, or any other number of maintenance tasks are required, work order management allows you to automatically assign work to an individual.
You can prioritize what work you need done first, automatically schedule work, view your inventory of spare parts, and track the status of any given job. Here, the main benefit is efficiency, so the benefits of work order management aren’t particularly affected by economic downturns. If you’re in the market for tools to make your business more resilient during the pandemic, consider work order management an added boon.
The Bottom Line
The amount of benefit you’ll derive from implementing a CMMS depends heavily on the makeup of your business. Businesses with a large number of assets, a delivery fleet, or a desire to make their preventive maintenance scheduling more efficient, will benefit the most.
Most CMMS are customizable, and many providers have worked extensively with restaurants. Given the SaaS nature of most CMMS, you can grow your business without losing balance by starting with free trials or on a lower cost monthly plan. Decide whether or not the cost of a CMMS outweighs the benefits through this process.
