NEXT Retail Group Warehouses Get Proactive with eMaint’s Mobile CMMS

NEXT is a large fashion and home goods retailer based in Enderby, England. In addition to their online presence, they have more than 500 stores in more than 70 countries. They also operate UK-based stores and e-commerce for multiple American fashion brands.

Operating 17 warehouses across the UK, each specialized for different types of products, NEXT had some unique needs. They needed to centralize and streamline  their operations while also taking advantage of Fluke Mobile’s capabilities, because Wi-Fi coverage in every square foot of the warehouses is not feasible.

After overcoming the hurdles facing the first implementation, the remaining rollouts were seamless. NEXT now has 10 databases across 17 sites. Though the  eMaint team couldn’t travel to NEXT sites in person for the initial rollout, they were there—remotely—every step of the way. “It was proper open heart surgery, what what we were performing at that time,” Winter said of the initial implementation.

“Each of the warehouses are slightly different, because each of them manage different products,” said Matt Winter, Head of Engineering at NEXT. “We do a lot of bedroom furniture out of one particular warehouse, we replenish the retail stores out of another warehouse. We have palletised warehouses, boxed warehouses, hanging garment warehouses. These are all fully automated.”

NEXT has an engineering department of 700 employees. All 700 use eMaint, with about 500 mobile users and 200 desktop users. Before implementing eMaint, the warehouses were essentially run independently. “A lot of things were done just via spreadsheets and and managed locally,” Winter said.
“They weren’t sharing experiences between them.”

One of the other challenges facing NEXT was the fact that large distribution centers aren’t designed with complete Wi-Fi coverage in mind. The engineering team needed to be able to work both online and offline without a hitch. Fortunately, with Fluke Mobile, connectivity is not a concern.

Most engineering employees carry a tablet to do their work, Winter said. “We find that the system is very stable because it’s cloud based, works over the Wi-Fi. The eMaint system tends to work quite well from a seamless perspective. It will be going on and offline and the actual end user who’s got the tablet in front of them sees very little difference,” Winter said.

Implementation at the first NEXT site began at a time of unique challenges. Both pandemic lockdowns and Brexit unfolded at the same time. eMaint employees were not able to travel to guide the implementation in person. Lead times for spare parts and shipping times both increased. The UK’s departure from the European Union “suddenly meant we had to deal with who’s importing the goods, who’s exporting the goods and paying all of those tax burdens, which we’ve never had to deal with previously,” Winter said. “Using eMaint enabled us to streamline and plan for those delays that we were going to have.”

After overcoming the hurdles facing the first implementation, the remaining rollouts were seamless. NEXT now has 10 databases across 17 sites. Though the eMaint team couldn’t travel to NEXT sites in person for the initial rollout, they were there—remotely—every step of the way. “It was proper open heart surgery, what what we were performing at that time,” Winter said of the initial implementation.

NEXT tracks multiple KPIs, such as asset uptime, using eMaint. With eMaint, “we can immediately see where the hot spots are,” Winter said. “We’ve referred to it as our top ten issues. We can immediately see and divert our attention into what the top issues are.”

Knowing what’s most pressing helps when it comes to optimizing the team’s time. “We log what we’ve referred to as engineer utilization,” Winter said. “What I mean by that is we can see the swing between reactive and proactive work.”

In a given week, 25 of an engineer’s 40 working hours should be focused on planned preventive maintenance, Winter said. “If those 40 hours are made up solely of reactive, it means we’re not doing any preventative works. We would then expect to see more downtime. So of course it means we have got to invest more time, maybe even lay on overtime, in order to get back on track.”

Using eMaint’s KPI dashboard, “we know what we need to achieve operationally on a day-to-day basis,” Winter said. “If you drive a car, you’ll know that when something’s going to go wrong, an orange light will appear on your dashboard. So for us, the eMaint system is the orange light on the dashboard, which tells us when something needs to be done.”

With all 17 warehouses using eMaint, the team has clearer insights and perspectives into their work. eMaint “enables the engineers not only to see the part that they play, it enables them to see the bigger picture,” Winter said.

“These warehouses employ a lot of engineering skill,” Winter said. “Not just electromechanical engineers, but we also have controls experts, people who, let’s say, drive the F1 car. We use the eMaint software to drive what is important to these 700 people.”

NEXT has also been able to streamline and improve their inventory management using eMaint. “That’s one of the great things that eMaint has enabled us to do,” Winter said. “We can hold one spare part across several warehouses, whereas before we were holding one spare part in every warehouse because nobody knew what each actually had.”

That centralized communication and ability to have everyone on the same page come into play in other areas as well. NEXT’s engineers are typically scheduled to work several days on, several days off. “When you come back to work, you don’t necessarily know what’s happened over the days that you’ve been off,” Winter said. “So to be able to look at the history, you can immediately see what’s happened previously. You’re already 50% down the road. You’re not having to start a fresh every time.”

“Ultimately, eMaint is the dashboard and it’s now become the heartbeat of the engineering department within the NEXT business. It’s the central focus now, the nucleus of what everybody’s working towards, whereas previously, everybody was sort of trying to do the right thing, but unfortunately pulling in different directions.”

“eMaint has now become the heartbeat of the engineering department within the NEXT business.”

– Matt Winter, Head of Engineering at Next Ltd