CMMS for restaurants and hospitality

In hospitality, maintenance has an immediate consequence it doesn’t have in other sectors: if something fails, the venue stops serving. A refrigerator that warms up means lost product; a broken extraction hood means a kitchen that can’t work; a broken dishwasher on a Friday means the whole service.

On top of that, the person who spots the problem is front-of-house or kitchen staff, who aren’t technicians and are in the middle of a shift.

The assets that actually matter

It’s worth ranking them by consequence, not by price.

Refrigeration. Cold rooms, cabinets, blast chillers, display units. This is where the food-safety risk and the product itself sit.

Extraction and ventilation. Hoods, ducts, filters, and motors. This determines whether cooking can happen at all, and has its own cleaning schedule.

Cooking and washing. Ovens, stovetops, fryers, dishwashers. Very intensive use, and very uneven between venues.

Building systems. Electricity, gas, hot water, dining room climate control, fire protection.

In asset management every one of these has its own record with model, serial number, installation date, warranty expiration, and location. That last field alone pays for the effort: in hospitality it’s very common to pay for a repair on equipment that was still under warranty simply because nobody had the date on hand.

And they’re grouped by model and family, which is what lets you define a check for a type of equipment once and apply it to every venue.

Temperature logs, with actual values

This is where the difference between a checklist of tick boxes and one with numbers really shows.

“Fridge 2: OK” isn’t good enough. “−19.4 °C at 08:15, logged by [name]” is, because it lets you see a trend and because it’s what you show when someone asks.

Checklists support fields with their own type, label, and minimum and maximum values, so a reading outside range is logged as an anomaly on the spot. They resolve in cascade — asset, model, subfamily, family — so a chain with thirty venues doesn’t need thirty separate protocols configured.

Those logs are what support the venue’s hygiene plan. To be precise: the system records and proves what was done; the one accountable to an inspection is the venue owner.

Letting the manager raise an alert without learning a system

Everything else depends on the quality of their report, so their interface needs to be: open a report with a photo, and check the status. Nothing more.

An incident can come in from the backend, from a dedicated access with a description and photo, or from an email inbox that the system empties and converts into alerts. It carries its type, priority, venue, affected equipment, and who’s handling it, and each status can have its own maximum time.

In a kitchen that difference is measured in hours, and hours mean service. Having what’s overdue show up on a list instead of being discovered when the manager calls again is, in practice, the quality indicator for the maintenance service.

The plan, running on three different clocks

The kitchen doesn’t have one plan: it has several overlapping ones. Hood and duct cleaning follows its own schedule; refrigeration has its own inspection; gas and electrical equipment follow their own regulatory schedule; and there are seasonal tune-ups.

Preventive maintenance supports several schedules at once on the same asset, and generates the work orders on its own, checking beforehand whether the day is a holiday and whether the technician is available.

And when wear depends more on use than on the calendar — a dishwasher in a hundred-cover venue isn’t the same as one in a three-hundred-cover venue — the equipment can carry a counter for cycles or hours with a limit and a warning percentage: once a logged reading crosses the threshold, the order is generated automatically.

The service windows

A trait specific to this sector: almost nothing can be done during service hours. Interventions happen between services, early in the morning, or on the closing day.

That’s why it matters to see the workload on the calendar and move work by dragging it. If rescheduling costs more than ignoring the plan, the plan gets ignored.

The providers, who are nearly everyone

In hospitality, practically all maintenance is done by external companies, usually a different one for refrigeration, extraction, cooking equipment, and gas.

Providers are registered and receive the orders assigned to them, with their time, materials, documentation, and signature, so their work stays in the same history. Since licenses are unlimited on all three plans, registering all of them isn’t a financial decision.

Without that, the owner has invoices but no case file, and can’t verify whether they’re getting what they’re paying for.

The documentation that gets requested

Duct cleaning certificates, gas and electrical installation inspections, maintenance contracts, technical spec sheets, pest control records.

The document manager attaches them to the venue, the asset, the provider, or the order, decides who can see them, and sets an expiration date, with a daily check for anything about to expire and its corresponding alert.

In a business where an inspection can show up unannounced, that reminder is probably the first thing the whole implementation pays for.

If you have several venues

This is where the system changes things the most. Reports by venue let you see which locations concentrate the breakdowns — which is almost never the ones you’d assume — which equipment model fails most across the whole network, and how much each one costs to maintain.

That last figure changes negotiations: a blast chiller model causing problems in fifteen venues stops being an anecdote and becomes an argument with the manufacturer.

There’s more on managing multiple sites in CMMS in a retail chain, and on temperature logging in CMMS for supermarkets.

Where to start

With refrigeration and extraction at a couple of venues, with their temperature checklists and their schedules, and with their providers registered. Within weeks there’s real logging happening and you can see what to adjust before rolling it out to the rest of the network.

If you’d like to see it with your own venues, you can request a demo.