4 Ways To Reduce Building Maintenance And Operations Costs

Building owners generally view maintenance as a sunk cost. Facilities are often underfunded, which forces building operators to be resourceful, creative, and downright magicians to keep buildings and assets operating. Over time, this lack of funding creates the reactive state that many facility teams find themselves in today. This reactive state breeds a whole host of costly problems for organizations, such as emergency maintenance, higher energy costs, and high turnover rates from staff.

Building operators have the power to leverage maintenance to maximize the value of their facilities. Use the four strategies below to optimize facilities management at your organization and reduce maintenance costs.

HOW TO REDUCE BUILDING MAINTENANCE COSTS

1. Improve Your Team Training

Reducing maintenance and operations costs starts with your MO teams knowing what to do. Your MO teams need technical training so they can repair equipment properly and complete preventive maintenance tasks, but also training on the type of culture that celebrates proper maintenance and collaboration. Doing regular training sessions may not seem like a high priority, but the more skilled your team is, the less time they have to spend waiting on instructions or help, and the less rework other team members will need to do. To get an idea of where to start, review your team’s key performance indicators (KPIs) to see areas that need improvement. Your facility management software’s reporting dashboard can also provide helpful insights into what training your team may need. 

2. Track Asset Work Order History

History can be boring, just ask any high schooler. But it is vital to making cost-effective facilities decisions. Knowing when and what work has been done on different assets can provide insights into whether an asset should be replaced, identify changes to preventive maintenance schedules, or indicate when to bring in an outside consultant. Without this tracking, you have to rely on your memory or search through mountains of paperwork orders which can lead to decisions that cost your organization money. With easily accessible documentation,  you see things, like how your team replaced the same motor in your water pump system three times over the span of a couple of months.

3. Automate Preventive Maintenance Schedules

Most facilities teams feel that their teams are “firefighters” and stuck in a reactive maintenance cycle. This reactive cycle can act like quicksand for many teams, where no matter how hard you fight, you keep falling further and further behind. Part of the problem is that when things get hectic, preventive maintenance tasks are almost always the ones to get pushed. It makes sense right? This causes that reactive cycle to continue to spiral as these preventive tasks lead to future breakdowns that end up costing way more to fix in the future. Automating your preventive maintenance schedules in a facility management software can help these tasks from falling through the cracks and keep them top of mind for your team. Preventive maintenance is a proven way to reduce maintenance costs and extend the useful life of your assets. 

4. Find the Right Facility Management Software

One of the biggest drains on facilities maintenance  budgets can be the training and onboarding of new staff. During the onboarding time, your team has to deal with reduced productivity as new hires are still learning the ropes, while veteran staff have to take time to train the new hires. This can become a real blocker to getting things done, especially if you have had or are about to have veteran staff retiring. If your team is using a facility management software, your new employees can quickly learn the ins and outs and routes of your facilities with ease. Your software can also save them tons of time when it comes to looking up critical information, such as any maintenance histories, asset O&M manuals, or special notes left by their team. With the right facility software, new employee training can be cut down from months to weeks and save your department tons of additional dollars in the operations budget.