A broken fryer, failed refrigerator, or downed HVAC system is more than a repair ticket. It can interrupt service, slow the kitchen, and leave guests with a poor experience. Yet many restaurant organizations still evaluate equipment failure through the cost of the invoice alone.
“The repair invoice is the tip of the iceberg,” says Tim Bernardez, global head of workplace management technology at JLL. “By the time you’re there, without a preventive or predictive strategy in place, you’re in purely reactive mode.” Reactive repairs, he says, can cost three to five times more than preventive maintenance and take 300 percent more time to complete.
Few assets carry more exposure than refrigeration and HVAC, both essential to food safety and the guest experience. “If you’re reactively maintaining those, meaning you’re waiting on them to fail before you act, that means a key part of your operations is out of commission, and that translates directly to lost revenue,” Bernardez says. A fryer, oven, griddle, or ice machine failure can create the same ripple effect: missed transactions, slower ticket times, wasted product, and emergency vendor costs.
The clearest sign of a reactive maintenance cycle is work performed only after an asset fails. Bernardez traces that pattern back to outdated tools. “Facilities management teams who are prone to performing reactive work are using out-of-date asset management tools like paper forms and Excel spreadsheets,” he says. “Those tools can’t speak to asset management histories. They can’t generate insights about what may fail next.”
A computerized maintenance management system, or CMMS, replaces those fragmented records with a single source of truth. JLL’s Corrigo Self-Help tracks each asset’s purchase date, installation date, cost, warranty status, and repair history, giving multiunit operators the visibility to make informed repair-versus-replace decisions rather than guesses.
Warranty tracking alone can carry major savings. “We at JLL commissioned a study back in 2021 that showed us that a typical organization implementing Corrigo Self-Help can achieve 75 percent cost savings on warranty-covered assets,” Bernardez says.
At scale, work-order management should do more than log a problem. Corrigo Self-Help automates task routing, tracks vendor compliance, and triages issues so simple tasks don’t compete with emergencies for attention. GPS check-ins verify when a vendor arrives and how long they stay, creating an auditable record that strengthens accountability around response times, cost, and completion quality.
Brinker International shows what’s possible when frontline teams can resolve minor issues without dispatching a technician. Corrigo Self-Help delivers equipment-specific, step-by-step troubleshooting at the point an issue is reported, creating a work order only if that guidance doesn’t resolve it. Across 1,200 locations, Brinker has resolved more than 14,000 issues without a technician visit and reports per-location monthly maintenance-cost reductions of 41–47 percent, totaling more than $2.25 million in savings.
“Managing these while controlling costs requires an approach that traditional fragmented service models, which rely on multiple disparate vendors, simply cannot deliver,” Bernardez says.
See how JLL Corrigo can help reduce downtime and put maintenance costs back under control by visiting their website.
