How to Save Time and Money on Building Maintenance

Written by Betty White

Even though building maintenance is one of the most important aspects of running any business, for some business owners, it can seem like wasting money. It’s understandable that because maintenance can be a big drain on resources, lowering a company’s profit margin. Additionally, this problem is even worse because most facilities in this day and age are severely underfunded. For this reason, building managers have to improve and be creative just to keep the building in working order. The worth thing about this is the fact that when building maintenance is not a top priority, there is a higher chance of something going wrong. However, if you leverage building maintenance, you will be able to prevent most bad occurrences. With that being said, we are going to cover a few ways how to save time and money on building maintenance.

Enhance Team Training

There is no way around it; if you want your facility to run smoothly, you must dedicate time and effort to maintain it. If you don’t, your operations expenses will surely catch up to you sooner or later. With that said, the best way to reduce these costs is to understand what you must do and how best to do it. The easiest way to do this is to hire a facility management service to do the job for you. However, your staff should also have technical training in order to effectively repair equipment and conduct preventative maintenance.

Furthermore, if you own a franchise, you should cultivate a culture of teamwork in the different facilities that you own. This will allow you to work together when a problem inevitably occurs. If you wish to find out in what aspects your team may be lacking, you should consider looking into key performance indicators. If you have any kind of facility management software in place, you can use it to get all necessary information.

Track the History of Work Orders

History is not just important but also useful to consider when it comes to making a cost-effective facility maintenance plan. If you have kept a log of all the maintenance work that has been done to your facility over the years, you will be able to see a pattern. This pattern will allow you to have a better understanding of how much maintenance your facility needs. However, it will also help you create an effective maintenance cycle.  If you expand your facility or open a new office, you should start tracking work orders as soon as possible. Not only that, but you should track every aspect of maintenance. From the office printer to the disinfection of your new office space, this is a crucial step. Therefore, make sure that you don’t skip it.

Automate a Preventative Maintenance Schedule

Being reactive is a good thing, especially if you are running out of budget. However, you should never rely on reactivity when it comes to maintenance. Maintenance is a planned process that you should have a schedule for. If your team repairs something on when it breaks down. that can lead to larger issues later down the line. Part of the issue is that preventative maintenance duties nearly always get put on the back burner when things become busy. This means that your equipment is only going to break down more as time goes by. Eventually, it will completely break, and it will cost you a lot more than if you spend some extra time on maintenance.

With that said, property maintenance software can help you automate your preventative maintenance routines. This way, you can train your staff to do regular maintenance work on their stations. Preventative maintenance is a tried-and-true method for lowering maintenance expenses and making your equipment last longer. Additionally, you should have extra parts ready if you believe that a breakdown of some piece of equipment is inevitable. The best way to do this is to rent a storage unit.  If you do this, all you will need is to make sure that you correctly store and protect expensive pieces of equipment until you need them. Then, once you need to replace an old piece of equipment, all you need to do is to take the replacement out of storage.

Make Use of the Best Facility Management Software

Training and onboarding new employees may be a significant drain on facility maintenance resources. During the onboarding period, your team will experience decreased production. This is because new workers are still only learning the ropes.  Not only that, but older employees need to devote time to training them. This will put additional strain on the business.  If you have or about to have a veteran employee retire,  this can be even worse. However, if you use facility management software, you can speed the process up. With it, new staff will be able to rapidly learn the ins and outs of your facilities.

This program may also save them  a significant amount of time when it comes to searching for vital information, such as maintenance history, asset O & M manuals, or unique comments made by their team. New employee training may be reduced from months to weeks with the correct facility management software, saving your department thousands of dollars in the operations budget.

Conclusion on How to Save Time and Money on Building Maintenance

As you can see, there are several ways how to save time and money on building maintenance. By now, it should be clear how important maintenance is. Not only will it make your work go smoother, but it will also save you money in the long run. If you implement even one of the methods we’ve mentioned, you will see some improvement. Thankfully, none of the methods that we’ve talked about require a lot of money to implement.  Some of them may require some time and patience. However, if you give them that, you will get much more in return.