Helgard Pienaar, Solutions Specialist
Massmart’s shareholders and customers have good reason to celebrate yet another success with the facilities management team involved in achieving the 2021 SAFMA Award for Technology. The national retailer’s commitment to digitise their facility and asset management processes and workflow has reaped a 25% increase in workflow efficiency across their 400 stores. Not only will this put sustainable savings on the table, but it will also free up valuable time for teams to focus on other aspects that further enhance the company’s customer-centric culture.
Since the onset of their journey to take facility and asset management to the next level, Massmart successfully tagged 400 stores’ assets and implemented On Key, Pragma’s enterprise asset management system (EAMS). The manner and time in which Massmart’s facilities team completed this mammoth task secured them a SAAMA Award in 2020.
Their continued dedication to streamlining and improving their workflow by digitising the process resulted in a measurably increased efficiency of 25%. With many stores and work orders to manage, the considerable time saving for operations and store managers can now be invested in core objectives, improvement initiatives and keeping customers satisfied.
“The goal was to implement an enterprise asset management system that would provide Massmart with a visual picture of facilities, assets and maintenance management for 400 stores nationwide. This has helped us to efficiently manage the maintenance of the facilities and assets and provide the maintenance history from the system, which is a compliance requirement,” explains Colin Garton, Massmart’s Facilities Management General Manager.
Supported by a comprehensive set of asset management business processes, Massmart has achieved cost savings by optimising maintenance tactics and control via the formal EAMS. Some additional spinoffs from streamlining the workflow process include these time savers and automated efficiencies:
- A preferred contractor based on store, asset type and type of service required can be automatically selected.
- The estimated cost of work is automatically proposed based on historical expenses.
- Administration is reduced as contractors now upload their invoices on work orders, and operations managers can approve work orders with the Approval app whilst ‘on the go’, without being deskbound.
- With the SAP interface, financial administration is reduced and accuracy of costing information is ensured.
- Massmart can now pay one consolidated invoice for all work done in a certain period per contractor or per region.
- The dashboard reduces manual maintenance of reports and statistics. It is also used to manage and increase contractor performance, and the view of the committed budget against the spent budget increases cost control.
“One of the project’s objectives was to make meaningful information granularly available to enable informed decision making that will optimise cost, risk and customer experience. Facilities operations have also been completely centralised and are managed from one system by one team, which is great for business and makes it much easier to identify continuous improvement opportunities,” says Thabelo Mbambale, a project engineer at Pragma.
The complete project consisted of various elements to ensure that the On Key EAMS is appropriately used and supports Massmart’s original vision. Hence, in addition to the EAMS implementation and streamlined workflow process, some main advantages achieved are:
- Asset tagging: Massmart took on the enormous challenge of tagging store assets themselves. Pragma’s streamlined asset tagging process and the mobile app simplified the task and equipped Massmart to maintain their asset register accurately.
- Setting up Massmart’s facilities call centre: The call centre is responsible for creating work orders requested by the stores for maintenance, managing supplier queries and other enquiries. Currently, the call centre manages an average of 250 work orders per day.
- Streamlined workflow process: Pragma and Massmart did a thorough process analysis to develop a simplified and streamlined workflow process. By incorporating interfaces and applications and automating the process, several time-consuming steps were eliminated.
- Cost control: Cost-saving opportunities were evaluated and best practices were implemented to manage costs and ensure savings. These included enforcing warranty management, structuring suppliers’ rates, combining non-urgent work with urgent work and reducing breakdowns with preventive maintenance.
- SAP interface: Administration effort is reduced by interfacing work order costing information between the On Key EAMS and SAP.
- Defining and developing meaningful dynamic reports (On Key Insights Business Intelligence tool): The available information enables Massmart to monitor costing on critical assets and drive cost-saving initiatives.
“One of the key success factors for Massmart is that they defined clear, measurable asset management key performance indicators (KPIs) with stretching targets, which are monitored and driven by everyone involved in asset management within the team,” says Kribban Coopoosamy, one of Pragma’s sector executives.
Because a software system is a critical component of a sound EAMS, Pragma developed On Key, a connected asset management suite. The suite redefines traditional lines of enterprise software in the asset management segment. It empowers clients with an integrated fit-for-purpose solution as opposed to a generic set of functionalities. The On Key Connected Asset Management Suite is a purposefully crafted set of platforms with an EAMS at its core. The EAMS functions as a system of record for all the primary asset management processes and is extended through supporting platforms. This strong information system backbone makes Pragma unique in its ability to offer a complete, integrated asset management solution that stretches across software, training, consulting, services and focused expertise.
Founded in 1997, the South African Facilities Management Association (SAFMA) is a self-sustaining body recognised locally and internationally for its meaningful role in the South African Facilities Management Community. SAFMA defines Facilities Management as an enabler of sustainable enterprise performance through the whole life management of productive workplaces and effective business support services.
For more information about SAFMA and their activities, visit www.safma.co.za
