The right strategy to maintaining shopping centers for both retailers and customers

Shopping centers are making a comeback. While a combination of the pandemic and a long-established shift to e-commerce seemed to spell the end of brick-and-mortar stores, footfall has steadily been rising in recent times. Shopping center operators are spurring this resurgence by transforming traditional malls into retail ‘destinations’, with a huge emphasis on providing multiple services and amenities under one roof and enhancing the customer experience overall. In delivering facilities and engineering services across 28 million sq. ft of shopping center space in England and Wales, we see this transformation happening first-hand.    

Unique destinations and demands  

Shopping centers share many of the same built environment challenges that every modern business faces. They need to ensure the health and safety of the people who use their sites, adhere to regulatory compliance, manage costs, adjust to changing consumer habits and expectations by right sizing their portfolio and digitizing where possible, and strive for increasingly ambitious environmental goals including net zero. 

However, for the transformation into destination to happen, shopping centers need to align their facilities and maintenance strategy with a unique set of requirements. As any operator knows, the number one priority is always the safety, comfort, and convenience of customers. And happy customers make for happy retailers. This means ensuring that the lighting is great, the temperature is right, the space is clean, areas such as automatic doorways and escalators work, and there is as little disruption to the customer’s experience as possible.   

In this respect, well-considered facilities management and maintenance can result in fewer unplanned breakdowns and less operational downtime, cost savings from fewer repairs, a longer lifespan for all assets, better energy efficiency, enhanced property value, and of course, higher retailer and customer satisfaction.   

Putting a plan together  

The first step of any maintenance strategy must be to create an asset register to record all fixed and removable assets and then classify them in order of criticality.

This should begin with all critical items, including power supply systems, life safety systems, lighting, washrooms, and lifts – then expand to everything else that maintenance can be tracked against, such as windows, floors, and doors.  

Once the inventory is in place, a maintenance plan can be put in place for each asset. Reactive repairs when things go wrong are inevitable, but a comprehensive planned preventative maintenance (PPM) schedule will ensure such incidents are reduced. A PPM schedule outlining the frequency of inspections should be based on the manufacturer’s recommendations, compliance requirements, asset history and local conditions that may affect each asset’s condition and performance, including external climate conditions and footfall. Here, it’s important to understand SFG20, the recognized UK industry standard for building maintenance specifications. The SFG20 database contains more than 1,000 maintenance schedules for 70+ equipment types, removing the need to consult manufacturer guidelines. Scheduling guidance within SFG20 includes the recommended frequency for maintaining each asset, minimizing over- or under-repairing, and a color-coding system based to assist prioritizing maintenance: red (statutory/legal); pink (mandatory/business critical); amber (optimal); and green (discretionary).   

Getting smart  

It is in the evolution of smart building technology where retail destinations can really enhance the customer experience. Footfall in a shopping center can vary significantly both during different times of the week and in specific areas of the site, putting different levels of demand on the same assets. Washrooms will experience much more frequent use on the weekend compared to a Tuesday afternoon, while the automatic doors of a more popular retail space will be made to work harder compared with quieter areas.  

With that in mind, equipping assets with sensors and connecting them to the network allows operators to monitor and measure their condition, including temperature and vibration, while growing historic datasets build a better picture of how they perform over time. This enables the development of a predictive maintenance plan, where a combination of analytics and machine learning algorithms analyze the data and forecast maintenance needs, ultimately reducing downtime and ensuring that engineers only service assets when necessary.  

The same smart sensor-based technology can help operators manage the customer experience in real time. This can be anything from a sensor alerting the facilities team to when a car park light has gone out to environmental controls that allow operators to adjust lighting and temperature on the spot, especially useful if areas of the shopping center are experiencing significantly high footfall or are out of use.  

The shopping center transformation into entertainment destination hinges on the ability to adapt and innovate in a rapidly evolving retail landscape. By implementing comprehensive maintenance strategies and leveraging smart building technologies, operators can ensure that their destinations remain attractive, efficient, and responsive to the needs of both retailers and customers. This proactive approach not only minimizes operational disruptions but also enhances the overall customer experience.  

By Mark Baker 

www.integral.co.uk 

Mark Baker is divisional director at Integral. Integral, a JLL company, is a leading building services and engineering firm in the UK. Integral provides end-to-end, technology-led services to ensure safe, compliant, and resilient buildings. The company’s unrivalled technical expertise helps create more efficient, sustainable spaces for all.