A Day In The Life Director Of Facilities Bob Hood

The Pantry's director of facilities, Bob Hood, begins his day before the sun rises. Usually rising between 4:30 and 5 a.m., Hood starts by working out at the gym or jogging in his neighborhood. He arrives at The Pantry's Sanford office around 7 a.m., and embarks on a 10- to 12-hour day.

What Hood does on a day-in, day-out basis is "very unpredictable," he said, due to being in the maintenance department. Overall, his main objective is to work with the management of the department to lead initiatives and tactics supporting its overall strategy: to serve the internal sales operations customers by providing timely, quality and cost-effective repairs, in support of their overall mission statement of being fast, friendly and clean.

"I stress this to all team members within the maintenance department. The store teams in the field that serve our guests are the heart of our business. To me that is our foundation and what we are here for," he said.

Hood's career path is somewhat circular. Upon graduation from Ohio State with a bachelor's in civil engineering, he entered the petroleum industry with a large petroleum company. His experience included serving as an environmental engineer and a construction project engineer. He later joined Lee-Moore Oil Co., a petroleum distributor whose headquarters were adjacent to The Pantry's Sanford, N.C., office. As director of operations, his responsibilities included field operations, and maintenance and construction. Lee-Moore Oil is a more than 70-year-old company, whose former owner was one of the founders of The Pantry in 1967, and later divested its interest in the chain. Hood joined The Pantry in 2006, the same year as the remaining Lee-Moore Oil operating assets were sold to The Pantry.

Hood came to The Pantry as the director of acquisitions. He quickly moved into real estate, then back into his area of expertise — maintenance and construction.

"I was very excited about the opportunity to join The Pantry," said Hood. "I've been in the petroleum retail business since 1990, and I love the business of fuel retail and working with people in maintenance and construction."

One of the tasks Hood tackles during his day includes managing special projects. When Convenience Store News was visiting, he was overseeing the rollout of a new water filtration system, as part of the company's Fresh Initiative. Most of The Pantry's stores already have some type of filtration system in place, but they are being replaced in all stores by the end of the year with a consistent, state-of-the-art solution. Another special project is a ceiling replacement plan that aims to give the stores a more consistent and clean look. And the team is also getting involved in the Fresh project by establishing PM service programs for the new equipment, including refrigerated cases, coffee equipment and more.

"We're playing a much more active role with the operations and marketing department to support these new initiatives than we have in the past," Hood said.

Another thing Hood is currently involved with is testing energy-efficient lighting at some sites. Roughly 200 stores were upgraded with the "latest and greatest" energy-efficient lamps as of CSNews' visit, he said, noting the new lighting looks better, but the economics of the program are still being studied.

In addition, he is overseeing improvements in the technician department, in efforts to increase its size and capacity by recruiting and training additional professionals. While the size of Hood's department has more than doubled since he joined it two years ago, the group is also looking to further consolidate the external work subcontracted to its key vendor base. Technicians are also being cross trained for enhanced coverage at stores, so they can provide gas maintenance as well as general maintenance in one visit, Hood explained.

Managing maintenance at the chain's more than 1,600 stores is one of Hood's challenges, especially as many of the stores came through acquisitions of different companies, and host a wide variety of equipment, much of which is older, according to Hood.

"With that number of stores, we handle about 11,000 work orders per month through 10 dispatchers and 40 technicians, 24/7/365," he said, noting the technicians handle calls covering gas, car wash and store equipment, roofing, parking lots and canopies, lighting, electrical and plumbing. Gas equipment generates the most calls, with more than half of work orders related to this area on any given day, according to Hood.

Helping Hood and his team is a year-old, fully automated dispatch system. When calls are made to the dispatchers, they select the best technician or vendor to complete the work. Calls are prioritized on a scale of one to four, and the department is striving to reduce the time it takes to complete work on critical and revenue-generating equipment. The third-party system complements the work of the dispatchers by optimizing the technician or vendor selection for each work order three times per day. It also tracks the status of an issue from when technicians arrive to the store, add parts to the work order, complete the call and leave. It also provides enhanced reporting capabilities, and is tied to the company's automatic billing system.

The system can also assign specific warranties to specific components on a piece of equipment, such as a compressor on a condensing unit. When there is a call related to that equipment, the system will notify the team that there is a warranty, and specify the company or vendor needed to respond to that issue, Hood explained.

Hood also watches over routine maintenance escalation items that are sent his way, and is involved in capital bid reviews for projects. During the integration of new acquisitions, Hood and his team will begin any deferred maintenance completions for "things that were deferred longer than they should have been," and bring newly acquired stores up to the current standards, he said.

"I was very excited to join The Pantry."