The majority of building owners consider maintenance to be a sunk cost. Due to underfunding, building operators are forced to be resourceful, creative, and downright magicians to keep buildings and assets operational. This lack of funding eventually leads to the reactive situation that many facility teams find themselves in today. This reactive posture causes a whole host of costly issues for organizations, such as emergency maintenance, higher energy expenses, and high staff turnover rates.
Building operators have the ability to leverage maintenance to increase the value of their facilities. Use the four tactics listed below to improve facility management at your organization and lower the cost of building maintenance.
HOW TO LOWER THE COST OF BUILDING MAINTENANCE?
- Improve Your Team Training
Knowing what to do first, start with your team to reduce maintenance and operations costs. Your teams require technical training in order to effectively repair equipment and complete preventative maintenance duties, as well as training in the type of culture that encourages proper maintenance and collaboration.
Regular training sessions may not appear to be a top priority, but the more talented your team is, the less time they will have to wait for instructions or assistance, and the less rework other team members will have to perform. Examine your team’s key performance indicators (KPIs) to identify areas for improvement to get an idea of where to begin. The reporting dashboard in your facility management software can also help you figure out what kind of training your team needs.
- Track Asset Work Order History
Any high schooler will tell you that history can be boring. However, it is important to make cost-effective facility decisions. Realizing when and what work has been done on various assets can help provide insight to determine maybe an asset should be replaced, detect changes to preventative maintenance schedules, or identify when an outside consultant should be brought in.
You’d have to depend on your memory or go through masses of paperwork orders if you didn’t have this tracking, which might lead to decisions that will cost your company money. You can see things like how your team changed the same motor in your HVAC system three times in a few months because it kept catching fire (yes, this occurred!) with easily accessible documentation.
- Automate Preventive Maintenance Schedules
The majority of facilities teams believe they are “firefighters” and stuck in a reactive maintenance cycle. For many teams, this reactive cycle can behave like quicksand, where no matter how hard you fight, they keep falling further and more behind. Part of the issue is that, when things become hectic, preventive maintenance duties are nearly always the ones to get pushed. Is it making sense? There isn’t an irate occupant on the other end, and there isn’t a boss who is receiving orders from executive leadership to repair the broken equipment.
However, as these preventive efforts lead to future breakdowns, the reactive cycle continues to spiral, costing far more to rectify in the future. Preventive maintenance schedules may be automated in facilities management software, preventing them from falling through the cracks and keeping them top of mind for your team. Preventive maintenance is a proofed method for lowering maintenance expenses and extending the life of your assets.
- Find the Right Facility Management Software
The training and onboarding of new employees can be one of the biggest drains on facilities maintenance budgets. Your team needs to deal with lower productivity during the onboarding period, as new hires are still learning the ropes and veteran employees must devote time to training the new hires. This can be a major obstacle to getting things done, especially if veteran staff have retired or are soon to retire.
Your new employees will be able to rapidly understand the ins and outs of your facilities if your team uses facility management software, particularly software that includes asset databases and layout maps for each asset and floor. When it comes to looking up crucial information, such as maintenance histories, asset O&M manuals, or unique notes left by their team, your software can save them a lot of time.
New employee training can be reduced from months to weeks with the appropriate facilities software, saving your department additional dollars in the operations budget.
Are you looking for more methods to lower the cost of building maintenance? Learn how a software solution like CloudApper Facilities can assist you in lowering maintenance expenses and increase the efficiency of your teams.
