June 15, 2023

How Albertsons makes better business decisions with Corrigo data

Matt Medina is the Senior Director of Facilities for Albertsons stores where he began bagging groceries more than 30 years ago.

Multiple job promotions and increasing management responsibilities over the next several decades gave Matt a deep understanding of day-to-day store operations that now inform his facilities management (FM) role overseeing 2,300 Albertsons stores across the U.S.

Corrigo integrates with Albertsons’ extensive asset tagging

Using the Corrigo mobile app, facility managers walking the store can scan an asset tag on a refrigerated case, for example, see the full maintenance history, and decide on the spot whether to repair or replace the asset. Corrigo drives faster, data-driven decisions for more efficient FM.

Discover how to boost the performance of your grocery facilities management team. Contact a Corrigo expert today.

Corrigo data allows us to consistently make better decisions about our assets.

Matt Medina

Senior Director of Facilities, Albertsons Companies

Video transcript

I’m Matt Medina. I am the senior director of facilities for corporate for Albertsons. My day-to-day responsibilities include budgeting for the entire company. All of my 13 different divisions don’t report to me. So, we have to develop a relationship with those divisions by sharing best practices and implementing programs, and that includes compliance and all of the things that the maintenance department does, a facilities department, rather. Basically have the whole company working together as a team to achieve the same goals.

What struggles does Corrigo address for you?

So one of my biggest struggles in the future is compliance, right? We want to make sure that we’re compliant. Obviously, repair costs have gone up, and so we need to look at ways to be more efficient, more effective.

We need to ensure that we’re getting the service that we paid for, and that it was quality service that was provided. We look at better ways of maintaining our equipment and our stores, and we do that through investing capital or just making sure when we do make a repair, it was the right repair, and it was the right decision to be made based on some of the information that we have now.

We have a wealth of information that we’ve really not had in the past, and so with asset tagging, there’s information we can now directly tie to the repair costs to an asset, so better decisions can be made by folks in the field. We can decide whether or not we should repair a piece of equipment, or is it really an energy hog that we should be replacing at all? And by the way, we’ve spent more than it’s worth in the last year. So information like that actually makes our jobs a whole lot easier for making the right decision.

How does Corrigo enable better decision making?

One of the biggest things we’ve done in the last several years is asset tagging, like the entire company. And that is a feat in itself. And then the question is what you do with that information once you have it? And our answer is that it needs to go into Corrigo. So we worked with Taylor Hodges and started to input this information, then we had to do data scrubbing to make sure it’s right. I think we just talked about some of this recently, but that involves the continuous updating of a huge database, and you have to have a platform like Corrigo to be able to do that. Probably one of the biggest things where we’ve made a change is to try and make better business decisions as a company, and that’s where Corrigo was able to support us in that effort.

Another one we obviously have is compliance, and there are lots of new regulations coming where we have to store paperwork and track refrigerant charges and things of that nature that are compliance related. We just recently integrated with TrackRef, so that the techs in the field, rather than hunting down some paperwork, we can flag that in Corrigo, and yes, we added refrigerant at this location, and it was this many pounds.

Instantly that will be sent out, and our refrigerant tracking company, TrackRef, will open an incident. The two platforms will discuss, and then that particular incident will not only be in TrackRef where we can be compliant and start to add it into our numbers and address any other compliance type inputs that need to happen, but it’s made it easier for our techs not to make the mistake of not telling us that we added refrigerant.

And so for integrations like that, the Corrigo team is always willing to go the extra mile just to enable us to eliminate some places where we might have a failure.

How did COVID impact your business?

So COVID definitely is something that affected the grocery industry quite a bit. For obvious reasons, you know a lot of folks are eating at home now. It’s made us look at how we do things across the entire organization. It also made us realize that our folks don’t need to be in the office as much as they should have been or had been previously. So I think just realizing that, hey, if you have your associates in the office, they’re not necessarily out making sure that we got what we paid for. Verifying that work was completed and completed correctly, interacting with our customers, who, by the way, are the stores, store management, and the division personnel.

It gave us an opportunity to realize that our folks could be out in the stores and in the field and doing some of the things that a maintenance department should do versus being stuck in the office, just because they thought that they needed to be there. So it was a big change for me as it was for a lot of folks. It took a little bit of getting used to. And then you realize that, hey, you’re getting just as much done, if not more, and being more productive in the time that we have our folks doing that facilities type work.

How has Corrigo boosted FM performance?

Corrigo really has helped us as an organization to allow our customers to focus more of their time on simply selling groceries, right? That’s what our customers (the stores) do. We really want them focused on that. What ends up happening is with the new asset tagging programs all loaded into the Corrigo database, the store director can be walking a store and simply scan an asset tag, knowing that there’s an issue, and open a work order on the spot. He never has to go back to the office to sit down and try to remember what was damaged or broken, or which unit it was. It’s all taken care of instantly on the sales floor.

That’s helped us greatly to address problems faster and more efficiently. And then also make sure that we’re tracking the problems to that specific asset. So, that that’s a huge time saver, I think for us. It’s also a great improvement for our customers. The stores can then go back to focusing on their own customers and selling groceries.

Some of the other things that I think are excellent and that have been a big help to us is just the amount of information that’s available inside this database. It’s tracking everything, of course, there could always be more! So, I sometimes sit and think about how do I get some specific information I need? And most times I’m able to pull that out of Corrigo, and, if I can’t, I can work with the Corrigo team, and say, hey, I want to know every time that “this” happens. Then, they’re able to go in and flag something or create a word search that will bring me all of that information, so we can make better business decisions.

And so I think that the amount of data that’s coming out of the database and the whole Corrigo work force platform is beneficial in every decision that we make.

How has Corrigo automated your FM processes?

The asset tagging information that’s in there has made us—whereas before I would have to look and search to find some reactive spend information—now it’s all at my fingertips. And if I can grab that as I’m walking the store, I can make a decision on the spot. So, replacing a piece of equipment is done quickly rather than saying, “Hey, let’s look at what we spent here. We’ll be back in a week. We’ll figure it out.”

Now we can have that information right there to make a prompt, quick decision and take care of the customer. That’s something that benefits any business, I think. The speed to be able to react and make the right decision helps you in a lot of different ways, but, number one, just in productivity and making sure that piece of equipment doesn’t plague us anymore. We can remove it, get it out of the system, and replace it with a new asset or make the repair. We can decide what we want to do pretty much instantly.

I think that’s one of the best things that Corrigo and asset tagging has ever done, for us anyways as a company.

What would you tell other FMs about Corrigo?

I would tell them that Corrigo has so much information and has so much support, that if it doesn’t provide what you need, they will fix it, adjust it, integrate, and make changes to tailor it basically to your platform. They’ll give you what you need to be successful.

You know, I mentioned actually not too long ago that I think that I speak with the Corrigo personnel on a on a more regular basis sometimes than my own team. And so there’s never an issue of “Hey, I reached out two weeks ago, and I haven’t heard anything.” We’re pretty much on a strict cadence, and we talk about the issues and problems until they get resolved.

So great customer support there, and I think once you see the benefits that you can utilize through the program and the system translate to the P&L and show you that, hey, this was the right decision. This was the right choice. Then you’d be sold that it’s a good platform and you can use it.