Your RE&FM tools should help you move faster, spend smarter, and stay in control. But do they?
As an RE&FM leader in retail, you operate in one of the most competitive and fast-changing markets. Your organisation is designed to make rapid decisions, whether it’s opening stores in a new country within weeks or refurbishing dozens of locations at short notice.
In this hyper-dynamic environment, fortunes can turn quickly. Strong results unlock new budgets and ambitious plans. A weak month, however, often brings immediate cost-cutting measures, forcing you to delay improvements and stretch existing resources further.
High-performing retailers stand out by being both agile and disciplined. They adapt swiftly to market changes while staying predictable enough to protect margins. Smart processes and tools become a strategic edge that competitors find difficult to replicate.
The challenge? Traditional RE&FM ways of working are often slow and reactive, unless they’re intentionally designed to be agile and proactive.
Why this is so difficult?
Several industry realities make balancing agility with control especially tough:
- Dealing with operation size and complexity
Many organisations aim to be more data-driven but lack tools that connect assets, tickets, and costs to performance. Inefficient communication flows create heavy administrative burdens. Before automation, one client managed 10,000 suppliers and 250,000 tickets annually, by email and phone. - Everything everywhere, all at once
Store openings rarely follow a neat pattern. Q4 often becomes a pressure cooker of activity, and without the visibility a robust RE&FM platform provides, chaos quickly follows. - Safeguarding healthy margins requires accurate data
Retail margins are the result of countless small, rapid adjustments. Without a centralised system for supplier contracts and documentation, data becomes fragmented. That makes cost analysis, performance tracking, compliance, and proactive maintenance nearly impossible, leading to inefficiencies and cost overruns. Hyperexpansion and downsizing call for different RE&FM strategies
Hyperexpansion: Retailers opening hundreds of stores annually need tools to support expansion pipelines, standardise business cases, automate benchmarks, and consolidate investment decisions. They need precise insights into operational stores, upcoming launches, new opportunities, and individual store performance. For assets, the focus is on aggressively extending lifespans to control investments.Downsizing: Retailers under e-commerce pressure are closing stores. Their focus shifts to cost rationalisation, contractor SLA monitoring, and refurbishments at longer intervals.
- The war for talent
Retailers compete for the same talent as high-prestige industries or companies based in city centres. Having streamlined processes, world-class tools, and smart workspace management capabilities is becoming a must-have to remain attractive. This too demands hefty requirements of RE&FM tools.
How to build RE&FM systems that balance agility and control
To tackle these challenges head-on and deliver nimbleness and predictability, here’s how I recommend that you shape your RE&FM systems:
Think ecosystem, not just system
Your system doesn’t live in a vacuum. The real power comes from how well it integrates with other platforms – finance, HR, project planning. Look for tools that connect data across sources to give you clean, actionable insights based on accurate, non-redundant data. Today, the best solution is never the best system; it’s the one that enables the best ecosystem.
For example, it can be tricky for end users in stores to understand where to report their IT maintenance tickets vs. building maintenance. Smart suppliers will help you with portals and apps that make operational employees’ lives easier.
Create a long-term vision for your system’s evolution
Have a long-term plan for how your system and processes should evolve. It’s always easier and cheaper to adjust an existing plan than to fix issues caused by short-term improvisation.
The best teams we’ve seen set up a Change Advisory Board that anticipates future business changes or required capabilities while understanding the broad possibilities that the platform can offer.
Choose a flexible system – and a flexible supplier
To support your proprietary processes, your IWMS/RE&FM system must allow easy configuration to your specific business rules.
Focus and adaptability should also come from the platform’s supplier itself. Whether during implementation, system support, or managed services, it will need to be highly reactive: short communication lines, stable knowledgeable teams, and strong internal cooperation between its own development, support, and account management functions.
Check the governance your supplier proposes: you need a model that allows you to plan the long-term strategic vision and address short-term operational issues equally effectively.
Be tough on customisation
Custom code often feels like a shortcut, but it’ll become a long-term trap, making updates and integrations cumbersome and costly. Our most successful clients are ruthless about avoiding unnecessary system customisation. They absolutely forbid their organisation to adapt the off-the-shelf solution, no matter how global or diverse their operations are.
We support a global retail chain with over 5,000 stores in over 70 countries without a single customisation. In the rare cases where the tool couldn't be adjusted to fit an existing process, it adapted the process instead. It’s a tough battle with every local market, but the benefits in cost savings, speed, and knowledge sharing are massive.
It also leveraged the system’s implementation to review, streamline and harmonise its processes globally.
Appoint regional process and system experts
Building a network of process and system experts across countries and regions changes everything. Instead of the central app manager becoming a bottleneck for every small question, you have a knowledgeable team that can support end users locally and drive change much faster.
It also means newcomers can be on-boarded faster, even in a complex global environment.
Final thoughts
Retail never slows down. If you want your RE&FM organisation to stay relevant and help your business grow, be intentional about building processes and choosing systems that are nimble and predictable
Where does your current system empower you, and where does it stand in your way? Let me know! I’d be glad to tackle your challenges in a future post.
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