Corrigo communications enable efficient FM for Brinker International

John Skeels is the Facilities Project Manager for Brinker International, owner of Chili’s and Maggiano’s Little Italy restaurants and two virtual brands.

Corrigo is a huge time-saver allowing restaurant managers to communicate directly with service providers. Visibility into what’s breaking enables better decisions about equipment and vendors and generates cost-savings.

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

Video transcript

I’m John Skeels with Brinker International, and I’m the facilities project manager. Brinker is a restaurant company. We own Chili’s, Maggiano’s and two virtual brands: It’s Just Wings and Maggiano’s Italian Classics. Brinker is an international brand, and I support the USA region, and there’s a whole global geo as well.

Brinker went live with Corrigo about a year and a half ago. I’ve got extensive experience with the software dating back to 2012. Our recent implementation was probably a little bit smoother because I had lot of that knowledge that I brought with me.

We decided to go with Corrigo, and its out-of-the-box configuration already had what we needed. The tracking of repair and maintenance and the capture of failure are huge.

What did your daily FM operations look like before Corrigo?

Before, it was all spreadsheets and emails. When the pandemic hit, we didn’t have Corrigo in place yet. I had to use online spreadsheet tools to fill in the blanks. It was a user forum, and it gave us the ability for our customers—our restaurants—to be able to report problems, but we couldn’t dispatch out to our vendors. We had to use e-mail, so that and the invoicing was really painful. Corrigo definitely solved that for us.

How has Corrigo made your FM team more efficient?

On the communication front, because you can communicate through the work order that is issued, Corrigo keeps everything tied together nicely. You’re not having to chase an e-mail to figure out what the problem was or who got work order. It’s all in a nice little package for you. It’s a huge time saver. It gives us the ability to let our restaurant managers call directly to the vendor that’s providing the service and get updates without having to go to their regional facility manager, who’s supporting 100-plus restaurants. It puts a lot of information at the fingertips of the user.

I would say Corrigo helps our bottom line in terms of manpower, just in time savings. As far as cost savings on repairs, it gives us visibility into what’s breaking, so we can take that information and save the company money in those ways by choosing different equipment or different vendors.

How do you use Corrigo reports?

Corrigo gives us great reporting. Within the tool itself, there’s a great reporting wizard that we can pull ad hoc from, design our own reports, push reports, and then if we need more analysis, we also utilize the database. We use that to tie into our analytics team, so we can look at our internal metrics and sales budgets. Combine that with accounting information in Corrigo, and it gives us an all-in picture.

What are the main benefits of Corrigo?

The most valuable part of Corrigo for our business is the fact that it ties together all of the reported problems and the invoicing that goes along with that. It gives us the tracking in the communication piece. It enables like a dozen facility managers to support upwards of around 1,200 restaurants. What a difference from the time we used to run our FM using email spreadsheets. Corrigo is a major time saver for them to get on their phones, use the Corrigo mobile app and dispatch work orders and follow up as necessary.