Aging Assets and Rapid Expansion Have Facilities Teams Rethinking the Meaning of Proactive Operations

Facilities teams across retail, healthcare, and commercial real estate are running into the same wall. Assets pushed to their limits during the pandemic are failing faster than planned, skilled labor is harder to find and more expensive to retain, and rapid expansion keeps adding locations before the last round of operational problems is solved. The result is a growing gap between what leadership expects and what facilities teams can deliver without a fundamental shift in how they operate.

Nelson Peña is Director of Facilities at Brookshire Grocery Company, a Tyler, Texas-based regional grocery chain operating more than 200 stores across Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. A 13-year veteran of facilities operations at Sam's Club and Walmart, Peña was hired to build out Brookshire's facilities management function from the ground up. His perspective is shaped by the challenge of standing up a strategic operation inside a company that is actively growing.

"Facilities only becomes strategic when we move beyond repair and replace and start using asset data and lifecycle planning to make proactive decisions instead of constantly reacting to failures." The foundation of that shift, Peña says, starts not with technology but with relationships.

• Relationship before process: Managing facilities across more than 200 locations requires trust with operations teams in every region. Peña identifies this as the first order of business. "You can see all the moving pieces. But ultimately, it's building the relationship with trust and reliability with our partners in different regions. That's the first step."

• The capital conversation: Executive teams set growth targets, but those targets often collide with the reality of aging infrastructure and rising labor costs. "The C-suite has an expectation of where they want to go. But that expectation doesn't always execute in implementation. Growth puts a strain on current assets, and the replacement, the repairing, the preventative maintenance behind all that increases."

• Redlining through COVID: The pandemic didn't just delay maintenance. It accelerated the wear on physical assets across the industry while supply chains for parts seized up. "We were redlining. Sales were ramping up, and now we're facing assets that are worn out a lot quicker than we planned." Finding the true new balance of where the industry sits, Peña says, is the central question for 2026.

Data collected through work orders, asset tracking, and repeat failure analysis is what transforms maintenance from a cost center into a strategic function. Peña says it helps his team identify the right equipment for each application, flag training gaps, and allocate resources across a complex portfolio. "Data shows us if something has repeat failures. That also shows if the type of equipment is maybe the wrong type, or if it presents a training opportunity for the field."

• The knowledge cliff: Getting teams to adopt better documentation requires education, not mandates. "Across our industry, many skilled trades professionals are at or nearing retirement age, and I’m seeing that same reality within my own organization and in previous roles," notes Peña. "These individuals represent some of the most knowledgeable people in the organization, carrying decades of hands-on experience and deep tribal knowledge about our facilities, systems, and historical decision-making. Much of that insight has never been formally documented."

• Tribal knowledge to documented process: "My approach is practical and respectful of that expertise. I spend time with long-tenured team members, capturing their process knowledge, decision logic, and lessons learned. I then leverage AI tools to organize and formalize those notes into structured standard operating procedures. AI allows me to turn raw field knowledge into usable SOPs that become a baseline for how we’ve historically done something, while also giving us the ability to modernize and improve it." This approach helps bridge the knowledge gap across a large geographic footprint, preserves institutional intelligence before it walks out the door, and strengthens the next generation of operators with documented, scalable processes rather than informal know-how.

• Vision versus reality: The disconnect between executive growth plans and operational readiness is where many organizations quietly accumulate risk. When companies acquire new locations, the projected ROI on paper rarely accounts for the condition of the physical assets they inherit. "There's a calculated ROI the business people see. But the reality is, we're taking over this building and it needs a new water heater, new windows. That starts to eat away at that percentage, and then you have to explain why we didn't hit the vision numbers."

The challenge for facilities leaders is making that reality visible before it becomes a surprise. Peña says the path forward is aligning executive vision with what the operation can actually absorb, accounting for the procurement demands, vendor capacity, and process maturity that growth requires.