Around the Country in 28 Days

CASE STUDY

 

Retailers depend on planned maintenance to keep their facility appearance up to standard, thereby protecting their brand. A national retailer contracted Resicom to perform a broad spectrum of overnight maintenance projects including painting, staining, and general carpentry at multiple locations. The proposed schedule included 110 stores across 12 states, many with multiple facilities in a particular city.

 

Scope

The scope of work needed to complete this conversion:

1. Conduct site visits 3 to 6 weeks prior to create the scope of work for each store.
2. Execute all work as designated by the project scope created during the initial site visit.
3. Alert mall and store management of our scheduled work one week prior to the start of work, verifying mall has all current insurance information.
4. Schedule overnight security for each location.
5. Conduct audit of all project execution no later than the day following completion.

 

Challenges

The challenges of this project included:

1. All work needed to be completed within the fiscal month (28 nights.)
2. All work needed to be completed overnight to minimize disruption to sales staff and guests.
3. Several locations were conducting internal overnight inventories or other maintenance services in progress that prohibited us from scheduling maintenance the same night.
4. The projects at certain stores would require more specialized work that required specifically skilled tradesmen.
5. Several locations were located at outdoor malls, which introduced weather related issues and limitations.

 

Solution

We created our maintenance schedule taking into account the overall needs of the client, deadlines, time and weather constraints, and the necessity to be flexible in scheduling ourselves around other activities being conducted overnight in the stores. The one month deadline was inflexible as we were scheduled to begin service to an entirely new set of stores the following month, and any delay would only create a domino effect of missed deadlines. Our solution for the project included:

1. Grouping stores in certain regions together to allow for schedule “runs” to maximize our workforce and reduce waste in travel time.
2. Utilizing multiple crews working simultaneously throughout the country to ensure that all deadlines are met.
3. Organizing each crew to contain the required specialized tradesmen for each run to ensure all work would be executed to exact specifications.
4. Cross-referencing our schedule against all other maintenance services, blackout dates, and inventories that were being conducted at stores to prevent conflicts.
5.  Purposely scheduling an extra day in each run allowed us to anticipate any problems that could be caused by inclement weather.

 

Summary

We were able to complete project scopes for all 110 stores within the 28 day window requested by the client. Only three visits needed an adjusted schedule, but those changes did not impact any other stores nor effect our overall deadline as we had built in the extra days anticipating inclement weather. We also needed to adjust 2 dates due to an unforeseen inventory date change, but we were able to accommodate the clients’ last minute request with ease. By remaining flexible and communicating clearly with the client we were able to successfully meet our client’s needs.