How Pet Supermarket Saved $460K+ Per Year and Gained Full Control of Vendor Management With OpenWrench

Matt Velker

Matt Velker

August 6, 2025

Pet Supermarket operates more than 225 retail locations in the United States. With a lean facilities team and hundreds of daily maintenance requests, they needed a faster, more transparent way to track issues, manage vendors, and reduce costs. But their legacy provider, a national facilities broker, made everything harder with: slow response times, no vendor choice, and zero visibility into spend.

After switching to OpenWrench, Pet Supermarket took control of its facilities operations. The team built a competitive Request for Proposal (RFP) process, developed stronger vendor relationships, and gave both store and facilities staff the tools to communicate clearly and resolve issues faster.

The results:

• $467K+ in annual savings
• $372K saved in maintenance costs
• $95K saved through competitive RFP bidding
• 20% faster issue resolution time
• 17% lower average work order cost
• 1,200+ hours of admin time saved with in-app work order communication

Background

Pet Supermarket is a specialty retailer with more than 225 locations across the Southeastern United States. The company offers a wide selection of pet food, supplies, and services and relies on a small facilities team to manage maintenance across its hundreds of stores.

The team is responsible for everything from plumbing and electrical issues to landscaping, refrigeration, signage, and general repairs. With such a broad scope and limited headcount, they needed a tool that would help them work more efficiently at scale while keeping costs down, vendors accountable, and store staff supported.

Challenge

Before OpenWrench, Pet Supermarket used Vixxo, a third-party facilities broker that left the team with little visibility or control. The platform dictated which vendors could be used, added a high markup to service invoices, and often delayed emergency dispatches by days.

Store teams were frustrated by unresolved issues and a lack of communication. Work orders were routinely duplicated because tickets weren’t updated or followed through, and multiple vendors were sometimes sent to resolve the same problem. Quotes took days to process, which meant repairs dragged on longer than they should have while costs kept rising.

Most of all, the team felt stuck. They couldn’t manage vendors directly, track performance, or make confident budgeting decisions based on accurate data.

With a growing store footprint and a facilities workload that wasn’t slowing down, the team knew they needed to make a change.

Solution

OpenWrench’s end-to-end facilities management platform gave Pet Supermarket the flexibility, visibility, and speed it had been missing. Implementation was fast and simple. The OpenWrench team handled data migration and onboarding, and trained staff across departments and vendors to ensure quick adoption.

Store staff can use work order notes to communicate directly with vendors for faster follow-ups and issue resolution. The facilities team also has access to these messages to stay up to date on any maintenance issues.

The platform now powers the team’s entire maintenance workflow, including:

• Work order management: Stores submit issues directly in the app, where the facilities team can review, assign, and track progress in real time.
• In-app communication: Notes, photos, and user mentions keep everyone aligned, from general managers to vendors to regional managers.
• Custom RFP process: High-cost jobs are competitively bid, which enables the team to benchmark pricing and make data-backed decisions.
• Vendor management: The team chooses its preferred vendors and builds long-term relationships that lead to better service and faster fixes.
• Preventive maintenance automation: Recurring tasks like landscaping and HVAC service are scheduled and dispatched automatically.

In OpenWrench's vendor management system, users can see their entire network of vendors, categorized by location and service type. You can also manually sort them by preference so other team members know who to contact first.

Ongoing support from OpenWrench has made it easy to scale and evolve their use of the platform over time. In fact, our RFP workflow is largely based on direct feedback from Pet Supermarket’s facilities team. This includes many time-saving features like:

• Sending out multiple vendor requests at once
• Adding in-app notes that all stores, facilities staff, and vendors can see with automated email and text notifications
• Nudging vendors who hadn’t yet responded

With OpenWrench's RFP workflow, Pet Supermarket's team get a complete picture of each RFP in one place, including active bidders, project dates, and total spend.

OpenWrench's RFP feature also allows users to see all the details of each bid, including proposed costs for each part of the project for maximum pricing transparency. The software also flags low bidders that might not deliver high-quality services based on their proposals.

Results

Since implementing OpenWrench in 2024, Pet Supermarket has achieved massive cost savings and administrative efficiencies across 3,400+ work orders:

• $95,727 saved through 38 RFPs in less than one year
  • $2,519 average savings per RFP
  • 21% of RFPs saved over $3,000 each
  • Peak savings: $20,600 on a single RFP
• 15,197 emails and phone calls replaced with in-app work order notes and updates
• At least $50,657 saved in administrative labor
  • 5 minutes saved per work order note * 15,197 notes = 1,266 hours
  • 1,266 hours * $40/hour for admin = $50,657
• 20% decrease in average resolution time (from 19.24 days to 15.31 days)
• 17% decrease in average work order cost (from $872.81 to $725)

Pet Supermarket saved over $95,000 in under a year by implementing a Request for Proposal (RFP) process. Based on feedback from the Pet Supermarket team, OpenWrench built a custom RFP workflow that is now available to all customers.

Pet Supermarket achieved a 20% decrease in OpenWrench's facilities management platform, which makes it easy for any team member to submit work orders, follow up with vendors, and close tickets.

With OpenWrench's in-app notes feature, Pet Supermarket's facilities teams, store employees, and vendors can send updates and ask questions in a unified messaging platform. This allowed them to avoid at least 1,200 hours of administrative labor, resulting in over $50,000 saved in labor costs.

Rather than chasing after vendors or following up on the same work order through phone calls and emails, Pet Supermarket saved time with OpenWrench's in-app work order notes.

Ready to Take Back Control of Your Facilities Management?

Pet Supermarket and OpenWrench continue to work hand in hand to refine and scale facilities operations. Together, they created a smarter system for managing work orders, coordinating vendors, and building a repeatable RFP process that delivered measurable savings.

This ongoing partnership has helped the Pet Supermarket team support hundreds of locations without increasing headcount or sacrificing service quality.

Curious to see what a true partnership with your facilities software provider looks like? OpenWrench can help your facilities team gain control, streamline communication, and build lasting relationships with vendors — all without extra overhead.

Schedule a demo today and get a custom walkthrough of our platform, along with a cost savings report tailored to your business.