Massmart pockets Global FM’s 2021 Highly Commended Award of Excellence in Facilities Management

What a privilege to congratulate Massmart on achieving the Highly Commended Award of Excellence in FM presented by the Global FM association.  Massmart is a well-deserving recipient of this award as they took full ownership of their facilities management journey and achieving their goals.

Previous awards

Massmart’s accomplishments started in 2020 when they won the SAAMA Project Award, followed by the SAFMA Award for Technology in 2021. 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. 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).

Massmart receives Global FM award during SAFMA World FM Day celebrations

SAFMA presented the award to Massmart during their World FM day celebrations. The event took on an engaging format, and award winners could explain the practices that led to their achievements. Ceremony host Cliff Hocking said, “It was a time for all to celebrate great successes and share in the valuable examples of best practice to adopt and adapt these lessons to FM generally in South Africa.”

Colin Garton, Massmart’s Facilities Management General Manager, explained how the application they used to tag all their assets simplified the process by adding assets to the database in real-time. Through this, they succeeded in finishing the tagging project across all their stores in South Africa in ten weeks.  Colin’s view of their biggest win was the successful integration between On Key EAM and Massmart’s SAP ERP system. “It just saved us so much labour in processing payments and provided improved accuracy, and it was all traceable, so it was an important win for us”.

Asked what Pragma thought was the key to Massmart’s success, Helgard Pienaar, Pragma Solutions Specialist, commented, “Massmart’s commitment to take ownership of the mammoth task to tag all their assets and embracing mobile technology to do it efficiently. Furthermore, Massmart had a thorough understanding of their former processes and was constantly challenging Pragma on ways to streamline these processes, which resulted in the use of several smart apps that greatly improved their efficiency and simplified administration.”

Watch an extract of Massmart’s Colin Garton and Pragma’s Helgard Pienaar, speaking about Massmart’s award-winning facilities management journey during the event.

The Massmart’s FM journey

Massmart had a goal to implement an enterprise asset management system that would provide them with a visual picture of facilities, assets and maintenance management for their 400 stores.

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 the 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.

Massmart will now be rolling out the same functionality to their stores throughout Africa.  More details about Massmart’s journey up to now can be read in this case study.

More about Global FM

Global FM is an international body with the objectives to operate as a single, united entity promoting Facilities Management and as a conduit for furthering the knowledge and understanding of FM. The association has 65000 members from 41 countries.  Several local Facilities Management associations, of which SAFMA is one, are members of Global FM. Read more about Global FM here.