In the last five years, facility directors across convenience, grocery, and retail have been navigating the most challenging cost environment in decades. Operating expenses are rising faster than top-line growth, labor markets are constrained, and customer expectations are only increasing. While new technology and automation promise relief, the reality is clear: without data-driven facilities strategies, brands will continue to see profits eroded by hidden costs, slow repairs, and poor asset lifecycle management.
The Cost Pressure is Real
Direct Store Operating Expenses (DSOE) in grocery and convenience have surged. In grocery, operating costs rose 12.7 percent in the last two years, with repairs and maintenance up 17.3 percent from 2022 to 2024. In convenience stores, DSOE has increased 40 percent since January 2021, with repairs and maintenance alone rising 38 percent during that period.
This level of inflation in non-discretionary costs cannot be ignored. For retailers where margins hover in the 2 to 3 percent range, every additional point of expense can mean millions lost across a national portfolio.
Downtime Is the Silent Revenue Killer
Consider the customer experience. In c-stores, nearly half of all trips include a beverage purchase, and beverages carry margins as high as 40 percent. If a coffee machine or fountain dispenser is down for even a day, the revenue loss compounds quickly. Research shows unplanned maintenance typically costs 3 to 9 times more than scheduled preventive maintenance. Yet in one major grocery case study, 19 percent of all break-fix work orders occurred within 30 days of the previous repair, signaling callback issues and poor quality fixes.
The math is stark. A single callback on a refrigeration unit can exceed $20,000 in repair spend in one year. Multiply that across hundreds of sites, and the hidden cost of poor facilities oversight becomes clear.
Why Traditional FM Models Fall Short
Historically, facility programs have been forced into trade-offs:
- In-house programs control cost but fail to scale.
- Third-party models scale quickly but often sacrifice quality.
- Both approaches suffer from unpredictable overages, with invoices bloated by time rounding, duplicate tickets, and unnecessary fees.
The result is an industry built on compromise. But compromise is not sustainable when consumer-facing brands compete on speed, freshness, and experience.
A Data-Led Future
Next-generation FM platforms are rewriting the rules. VixxoLink, for example, centralizes work order management, cost validation, and provider oversight. It uses 40 years of work order history to benchmark parts and labor costs, ensuring invoices reflect market-accurate pricing. This automated audit process has delivered $2.6 million in direct cost savings in just 12 months for convenience portfolios.
Beyond auditing, AI-enabled tools like VITA put technical knowledge in the hands of every field technician. By digitizing thousands of service manuals and error codes, VITA reduces troubleshooting time, leading to a 1.4 percent improvement in job completion rates across large portfolios. That may sound small, but scaled across 3.75 million work orders annually, it represents tens of thousands of hours saved.
The Preventive Maintenance ROI
The case for proactive maintenance has never been stronger. Studies confirm that unplanned maintenance is up to nine times more expensive than preventive care. For HVAC alone, consistent servicing can improve efficiency and reduce operational costs by 12 to 18 percent.
One study showed that after implementing preventive maintenance, energy costs fell by 16.7 percent in just the first year. When the program was canceled, costs quickly reverted to baseline within two quarters. This underscores a critical truth: preventive maintenance does not just save on repairs, it drives energy and utility savings, which are often the second-largest controllable expense after labor.
Turning Transparency Into Advantage
The next generation of facilities management will be defined by transparency. For too long, FM has operated in the shadows of corporate budgets, with leaders forced to accept ballooning invoices and inconsistent quality as a cost of doing business. But as technology shines light into these blind spots, leaders now have a choice.
- Invoice audits can identify hidden charges on labor and materials averaging 14 percent and 9 percent respectively.
- Provider benchmarking can drive 11 percent cost savings per work order by ensuring competitive rates and eliminating unnecessary truck rolls.
- Digital dashboards now allow real-time visibility into asset uptime, time-to-arrive, and first-time fix rates.
These capabilities transform FM from a reactive cost center into a strategic lever for brand experience and margin protection.
The Leadership Imperative
For facility directors and VPs, the mandate is no longer simply “keep the lights on.” The mandate is to protect profitability and brand reputation through smarter asset management. This requires:
- Embracing predictive insights: Leveraging AI and historical data to identify failure patterns before they become downtime events.
- Standardizing transparency: Moving beyond invoice reviews to real-time cost validation on every work order.
- Aligning FM with customer experience: Recognizing that a broken cooler or dark sign is not just a repair issue, it is a sales and loyalty issue.
As consumer-facing industries move into an era of razor-thin margins and heightened expectations, facilities leaders must position FM as a profit protector, not a back-office expense.
Conclusion
The economics of facility management are changing. With operating expenses rising by double digits and downtime costs multiplying, traditional approaches built on compromise no longer suffice. Data-driven, technology-enabled FM is no longer a nice-to-have; it is the only way to control cost, ensure quality, and protect scale.
The brands that win in the next five years will not be the ones with the lowest labor rates or the biggest provider lists. They will be the ones that turn facility data into actionable insight, preventing failures before they happen, auditing every dollar spent, and aligning FM directly with customer experience.
For facility directors, the path forward is clear: embrace the data, demand transparency, and lead facilities into the future.
