Greggs, one of the UK’s leading food-on-the-go-retailers, has reported productivity improvements of 146% in its delivery of Shop maintenance service as a result of using advanced real-time service management software from Aeromark to more efficiently manage the maintenance of its 1800  company managed shops and catering equipment nationwide. 

Serving millions of customers each week depends on Greggs’ service operations team maintaining its equipment and premises to optimum condition; from fridges and freezers, hot food units and coffee machines, to the speedy repair of shop fittings; from door handles to light fittings.

In today’s fiercely competitive market, the facilities service management operation is a vital backbone for all food service chains.  Any inefficiency has the potential to impact margins through higher costs and reduce revenue through lost sales and negative customer experience.  Equipment breakdown, such as a hot food unit or coffee machine with a fault, needs to be fixed as fast as possible to avoid lost sales, customer frustration and potentially money in a competitor’s pocket.

With the introduction of Aeromark’s advanced real-time service management platform, Greggs have increased the efficiency of its shop maintenance service supply chain, reduced subcontractor costs and use their in-house multi-skilled engineers more effectively.  As a result, the number of service or repair jobs each inhouse engineer can complete in a day has increased from three to more than 7, on average. 

Aeromark’s advanced real-time service management platform has enabled Greggs to increase the efficiency of its service; more effectively utilise its multiskilled internal engineers, reduce subcontractor costs and achieve significant overall costs savings. “The productivity improvement gained from using Aeromark’s real-time service management platform has enabled each of our engineers to increase the number of service and maintenance jobs they complete from three to more than seven, per day on average“ said Greggs National Maintenance  Operations Manager, Jason O’Neill “That’s a huge gain in efficiency.  Despite growing our company managed estate to 1,800 shops, we haven’t needed to increase the number of engineers required to maintain them, we’ve used our existing resources more effectively, increasing productivity by 146 per cent.”

The Aeromark system provides Greggs Shop maintenance operations team with a single centralised solution for asset management, dynamic real time scheduling of proactive and reactive work, integrated mobile workflows, vehicle tracking and seamless integration with subcontractors.

The system is also simpler and more efficient for shop staff to report issues and request engineer callouts.  Previously, shops had to ring a busy central contact centre which handles 1000s of calls each week.  Even relatively minor maintenance, such as a broken door handle, is important to report in order to maintain good looking shops and an exceptional customer experience.

Today, all 1800 company managed shops have access to a self-service portal to log a maintenance call in a few clicks.  Every asset is labelled and scanned for identification with a dropdown selector for problem codes. The system’s convenience and ease of use has seen an increase in number of jobs logged by staff for proactive maintenance while at the same time making Greggs planning team and engineers more efficient. 

“Aeromark’s multi-intervention feature provides us with full visibility of all jobs open at every shop.  Now when we schedule work, the system selects the most efficient route and shows us other jobs that have been logged at the shop so that engineers can complete them all in one visit.   It cuts out multiple engineer callouts to the same site and travel time backwards and forwards between sites. This means our engineers’ time is optimised; planning and scheduling is simpler, making us a more efficient team.” Adds Jason O’Neill.

When engineers need additional parts, they initiate a parts request via their Smartphone which triggers a requirement for the planning desk to place an order which will be delivered to the required shop.  When the parts are received, the shop updates the system via their self-service portal which sends the job for re-scheduling to fit parts.

“Service can’t be static. A huge benefit of the Aeromark system for Greggs is that it’s exceptionally configurable which enables us to continuously improve our service management operation. Our next step is to integrate Aeromark’s parts ordering and automated van stock replenishment system”

“The scale and growth ambitions of Greggs and their desire to continuously improve efficiency and customer experience meant they required a future-proof platform for their service management operation. Both teams have worked exceptionally well together to deliver these impressive results over a number of years, and we are all looking forward to the next phase of the project” said Roger Marks, MD, Aeromark.