Facility Health Score Insights Program Transforms Enterprise Maintenance

Leveraging refrigeration performance data drives food retail cost reductions.

Maintaining proper temperature ranges helps to minimize food loss (i.e., shrink), maximize food quality, and protect food safety. But as I pointed out in the April issue of Contracting Business, running all refrigeration assets at optimum performance is a demanding proposition, especially across a large enterprise of stores. When you factor in maintenance costs and high shrink rates, refrigeration issues can quickly chip away at razor-thin profit margins.

This scenario was all too familiar for one leading international food retailer and its dedicated contractor network. Faced with rising maintenance costs and increasing demands to manage all aspects of preserving product quality, they needed tools to address refrigeration performance outliers and gain control of their extensive equipment and asset portfolios across each store of their enterprise.

A user of the Copeland Connect+ enterprise management software since 2020, the retailer requested a solution for tracking the health and performance of their refrigeration assets in every store. The resultant program exceeded expectations, yielding a 33 percent reduction in monthly service expenses.

Daily maintenance costs add up

Challenges arose for our enterprise customer when some of their refrigerated display cases simply could not hold the required temperatures. Not only was this contributing to product shrink and lost sales, but more importantly, it was also negatively impacting customer experiences.

Every day, contractor teams responded to alarms popping up across the store network, rolling trucks to address the most urgent refrigeration repairs. This purely reactive maintenance strategy was unsustainable in the long term. The retailer needed a smarter approach that could help them be more proactive, data-driven and prescriptive in their maintenance efforts. Doing so would require visibility into the performance of each individual case and refrigeration rack — within every store of their retail network.

Implementing a solution

Copeland’s Connect+ data science and software teams began developing a solution designed to provide much-needed prescriptive and predictive insights into refrigeration performance at the enterprise level. Enter the Facility Health Score Insights tool, a new value-added service module that can be offered to existing Connect+ customers.

Facility Health Score Insights is an emerging solution that collects critical equipment performance observations and actionable insights into an accessible dashboard. This enables users to easily investigate issues in individual stores and assets, which scored to track their uptime metrics and health ratings. Upper and lower temperature boundaries are assigned to each refrigerated case using industry best practices, which represent standard temperature ranges for their respective perishable and frozen offerings.

The solutions team began proof of concept testing in the summer of 2023 at selected pilot stores already using Copeland Connect+. Discovery and training sessions were conducted for retailers and contractor networks, tailoring the solution to meet their specific needs, workflows and maintenance standard operating procedures (SOPs).

Delivering operational savings and data-driven insights

At the conclusion of the two-month trial, implementation of the Facility Health Score Insights solution had transformed the retailer’s operations significantly and improved their refrigeration performance. The contractor network had fully adopted the alarm management dashboard as part of its daily SOPs, helping them to triage issues, drill down for diagnoses, and respond much more effectively — all of which drove rapidly declining refrigeration alarm counts and maintenance expenses.

According to a contractor team lead, the tool enabled them to narrow their focus to the most critical issues. “Our whole process has changed. Now we can log in and focus on what’s causing the most issues,” the contractor said.

As scores improved, service costs were reduced. After two months, the solution helped them to lower monthly service costs by 33 percent while delivering a variety of associated program benefits, including:

• Minimizing nuisance alarms
• Lowering overall alarm volume
• Reducing unnecessary service calls, work orders and costs
• Increasing operational performance
• Eliminating at least one truck roll per store per month

To provide deeper insights, the Copeland data science team worked with the retailer and contractor to summarize the data they needed to generate monthly business reports — helping them to track key performance metrics and identify areas needing improvements. The reports are now part of their standard monthly and quarterly business metrics.

As a result of the successful trial, the retailer and contractor adopted the solution into their business and maintenance SOPs. Moving forward, the retailer noted that their near-term focus was to achieve stability in their alarm counts, with the long-term target to become even more proactive — and less reactive — in their maintenance programs.

“After we establish a new alarm baseline, we want to be much more proactive and leverage the case, rack and uptime scores to inform our decision-making and drive efficiencies,” they said.

To learn more about the Facility Health Score Insights program, download the full case study.