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 control maintenance to maximize the value of their facilities. Use the following strategies below to optimize facilities management at your organization and reduce maintenance costs.

• Prevent breakdowns

The best way to reduce maintenance costs is to prevent breakdowns or malfunctions. Not only because fixing damaged equipment is costly, but also because your operations have to slow down or even come to a halt in order to accommodate the reparation works. Organization should invest in a good preventive maintenance strategy and ideally in a computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) / software or Mobile App which is capable of scheduling, tracking and reviewing all technical operations.

• Improve Your Team Training

Reducing maintenance and operations costs starts with your teams knowing what to do. Your teams need technical training so they can repair equipment properly and complete preventive maintenance tasks. 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.

• Track Asset Work Order History

This is very crucial to make 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 paper work orders which can lead to decisions that cost your organization money.

• Automate Preventive Maintenance Schedules

Part of the problem is that when things get hectic, preventive maintenance tasks are almost always the ones to get pushed. Yet 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. 

• Find the Right Facility Management Software

If your team is using a facility management software, especially a software that has asset mapping and digitized floor plans, your new employees can quickly learn the ins and outs and routes of your facilities with ease and save lots of time of training. 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. Withthe 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.

• Extend the warranty/insurance period

Nothing functions flawlessly, specially the machinery equipment. It is always a good idea to insure the most expensive equipment for your business or to extend the warranty of some items. This will not only mean saving on maintenance costs but also on high repair costs. In some cases, you may even want to insure some specific components — talk to your technicians to decide which policy is the most appropriate for your business.