Bristol Farms uses Corrigo to automate grocery facilities management

Ali Dungarwalla is the director of support services for Bristol Farms, Lazy Acres Market, and New Leaf Community Market. He and his team use Corrigo to support 26 store locations across northern and southern California.

The Corrigo mobile app empowers store managers at Bristol Farms and the other markets to initiate work orders on their own and follow up with service providers for work order updates.

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Video transcript

Hi, my name is Ali Dungarwalla. I’m the director of support services for Bristol Farms, Lazy Acres Market, and New Leaf Community Market.

So, currently I manage 26 locations. We have 14 Bristol Farms in SoCal. We have six Lazy Acres Market locations also in SoCal, and six New Leaf Community Markets up in the northern California region.

Over the last year, we onboarded the New Leaf stores, which added the six locations to our portfolio. Along with this, we manage three corporate offices as well as a commissary with a full-fledged kitchen with all industrial-style kitchen equipment.

We scaled over the last two years, and Corrigo helped us better monitor and manage our stores as our portfolio grew. With Corrigo, I can manage the NorCal stores without being in NorCal. I have one representative on my team who is stationed in northern California. We have daily stand-ups where we connect, and escalations still happen just like they do in SoCal, but I have full visibility about what’s happening in northern California with their facility management.

The northern California stores have full visibility themselves to send messages and communicate with their vendors, so that I don’t have to be involved on a day-to-day basis, but I’m there for escalations if need be.

What are the challenges you wanted to address with Corrigo?

The number one issue I had was with invoicing. The process was very manual. I was printing off hundreds of invoices, stapling them together, signing them, and then walking them over to AP (accounts payable). During the last year, we improved on that by becoming fully integrated with AP through APIs and that has made my life so much easier.

How has Corrigo streamlined your operations?

I already touched on one of the enhancements, the integration between Corrigo and our AP department for invoicing—quicker payments, vendors happier they’re getting paid faster. So, that part was definitely amazing.

Another enhancement was actually putting the Corrigo mobile app in the hands of our customers, the store managers. They can use the app to scan the asset tag on a piece of equipment that’s not functioning properly. The app automatically opens a new work order notifies our team. At that point, my team becomes a simple dispatch center and not a work order processing center.

How does Corrigo help with preventive maintenance?

In terms of preventive maintenance, Corrigo has helped us actually update all of our systems. Previously, all of our preventive maintenance was done on paper. Vendors would turn in the invoice, and it was like, OK, this is what you worked on. Most of our vendors are connected vendors, and so, just this last year, I brought them all into Corrigo and set them up to perform PM/RM. I also set up the SLAs and the timings for that.

This gives full visibility to the stores to see how much was spent this quarter for preventive maintenance for HVAC. Previously, costs were lump-summed into their P&L. They didn’t have visibility into individual trades, unless they asked for specific invoices.

So now, using the PM/RM tool within Corrigo, stores can really dial down and say, “Did I really spend that much on preventive maintenance?” As we get the data into Corrigo, we’ll be able to generate a trend line and see, for example, if what we spent in quarter two helps us in quarter four.

What would you say to someone considering Corrigo?

For our organization, Corrigo is the best option because it gives us a relationship between the store—operations side—and the vendor side. Now we can actually bridge the gap separating the store from the vendors and vice versa.

Visibility with Corrigo allows stores to see maintenance operations, which creates more efficiencies and allows store managers to answer with conviction when an exec comes in and asks questions. With the Corrigo mobile app in the palms of their hands, store managers can respond, “Look, here’s what’s going on with this particular work order.”