GMAO CLOUD in GAME stores

GAME manages maintenance across its store network with GMAO CLOUD, and its case is a good way to explain a problem that neither industry nor third-party services have: the person who spots the breakdown isn’t technical, doesn’t work in maintenance, and has five other things to do. It’s the store manager, and everything else depends on the quality of that report.

On top of that there’s the sprawl. Dozens or hundreds of sites with similar installations, almost always served by different suppliers depending on the area, and a head office that needs to see the whole picture without taking away each store’s autonomy.

Here are the pieces that make it work.

Getting the report in properly from the store itself

The first point where information gets lost is at entry. If the store manager calls or sends a WhatsApp message, the report arrives with no photo, no way of knowing which piece of equipment it is, and no trace in any system.

What changes the outcome is giving them their own access. From the client portal — which in a chain is used by the stores themselves — the manager opens an incident with a description, the affected equipment and a photo, and can then follow its status without calling anyone. Two consequences: the report arrives ready to act on, and follow-up calls disappear.

The incident carries its type and subtype, its priority, the site, the address and who’s handling it. And each status can carry its own maximum time, so anything running past deadline shows up in a list instead of being discovered when the manager calls again.

One configuration, many sites

The second piece is not repeating work. A chain’s installations are very similar to each other: the same air conditioning, the same cameras, the same automatic doors, the same terminals.

In asset management, equipment is grouped by model and family, and the checklist is resolved in a cascade: if the specific asset doesn’t have its own, the system looks for its model’s, then its subfamily’s, then its family’s. That lets you define a schedule for a type of equipment once and roll it out across every site, fine-tuning only where one has something particular.

With that schedule and a frequency, preventive maintenance generates its orders for the whole chain on its own, checking beforehand whether the day is a holiday and whether the assigned technician or supplier is available.

External suppliers as part of the system

In retail, a large share of the work is done by people who aren’t on payroll. If those suppliers work outside the system, head office loses half the history and all cost control.

Suppliers are registered with their own associated warehouses and receive the orders assigned to them, so their work gets recorded just like in-house work: time, material and documentation. Since licenses are unlimited across every plan, registering all your subcontractors isn’t an economic decision — in a per-user model it would be, and it would end up with several people sharing the same account and a history that’s worthless as evidence.

Each supplier’s agreed price, applied on its own

This is one of the uses GAME makes of the system that saves the most administrative work, because it affects every order.

Each item carries its cost price. On top of that, a price per supplier is defined, with its own cost, its agreed discount, its supplier reference and its price list, and one of them marked as the default. When the order is generated, the agreed percentage is applied without anyone having to check a commercial agreement somewhere else.

The practical consequence is that delivery notes stop being reviewed by hand line by line. And there’s an organizational effect that often gets valued more than the time saved: payments and related issues go straight to accounting instead of passing through the store manager, who shouldn’t be dealing with that.

There’s also a connector between GMAO CLOUD installations, built for when both the company that contracts the work and the one that carries it out use the system: jobs move from one to the other with no intermediate file and no manually reconciling two lists.

Seeing the whole picture, not just the incident

What head office needs, and the store doesn’t, is the comparison. Per-site reports are what let you see which stores concentrate the breakdowns — which are almost never the ones you’d assume — which equipment fails most across the whole chain, and how much it costs to maintain each site.

That last figure is the one that changes negotiations. A machine model that causes problems in thirty stores stops being a local anecdote and becomes an argument with the manufacturer; a site costing three times as much to maintain as another one of the same size has an explanation worth chasing down.

Getting the data into the ERP

The last step is making sure what’s recorded doesn’t have to be typed in again. Closed work orders with their hours and material are exactly what the ERP needs for its billing and cost processes.

In GAME’s case, that step is handled by the Navision connector, which links both systems without manual intervention. GMAO CLOUD also has connectors in production with Business Central — with SOAP and OAuth2 variants and a multi-endpoint mode built for groups with more than one entity — SAP, Sage X3, Holded, Factura Directa, QuickBooks and STEL Order, plus Sage 200c through a direct database connection and a REST API. The scope of each one isn’t the same, and it’s worth checking: the detail is in integrations.

Every company is different and uses the system its own way. If you want to see how it would fit your network of sites, get in touch.

Cost per site, the conversation that really matters

In a chain, maintenance gets discussed in two very different places. In the store, it’s a breakdown; at head office, it’s an annual budget. The system has to serve both conversations, and they’re different data.

For head office, what matters is being able to put the cost of comparable sites side by side. Reports on cost per piece of equipment and per site, hours per supplier, and downtime let you see what share of spending is preventive and what share is corrective — usually the first indicator of whether the plan is sized correctly.

And it opens up a question that can almost never be asked otherwise: whether there are sites where too much is being spent because the frequency is excessive, and sites where too much is being spent because it’s insufficient. Both things happen at once in nearly every network, and without per-site history they can’t be told apart.

What to watch out for

Don’t make the manager learn a system. Their interface should be opening a report with a photo and checking the status. Nothing more.

Make sure suppliers really come on board. If they stay outside the system, those sites’ history doesn’t exist.

Start with a group of stores, not all of them. With ten sites and their critical equipment, you find out what needed adjusting before rolling it out to two hundred.

If you want to see how it would be set up for your network of sites, you can request a demo or get in touch.