04 · Service

Digital Transformation and Process Standardization

Making a change to the operating model stick across hundreds of sites — not just in the deck that announced it.

For: Multi-location organizations standardizing operations after growth, acquisition, or a decade of local improvisation.

What is usually wrong

  • The target process exists in a document and nowhere else.
  • Each region solved the same problem differently and all of them are now load-bearing.
  • Technology was rolled out without changing the process it was supposed to replace.
  • Adoption was declared complete on the go-live date and never measured again.

What I do

  • Define the target process concretely enough that a new site can be run from it.
  • Work out where local variation is genuinely necessary and where it is only habit.
  • Sequence the change so the field is not absorbing three transitions at once.
  • Track adoption as a metric with a threshold, and keep tracking after go-live.

What you get

  • A documented target process and the standards that support it.
  • A change plan sequenced by region, site type or vendor.
  • Adoption tracking with thresholds and a review cadence.
35+ Years in facilities management
12,000+ Properties managed at CVS Health
1M+ Services a year
28 yrs CVS Health tenure

People, process and technology, in that order

Transformation work fails on the people side far more often than the technology side. The pattern is consistent: a platform arrives, the old process keeps running beside it, and eighteen months later the organization owns two systems and trusts neither.

My last six years at ServiceChannel were spent on this problem with enterprise clients across several industries. The work that succeeded treated technology as the last step, not the first.

Scale changes the problem

A process that works at twenty sites is not a process that works at twelve thousand. At that scale exceptions stop being exceptions and become a second, undocumented operating model. Most of what I do here is finding those and deciding, deliberately, which ones to keep.

Have a facilities challenge like this?

Start with a 30-minute conversation, or send a message describing what you are dealing with.