The Worst Expense on a Building Owners P&L
If you’re a building owner, you know one of the most painful expenses to see on your Profit and Loss Statement (P&L) is high, unplanned maintenance costs. Unplanned maintenance can turn an otherwise great month into a loss; a few too many of these will turn an otherwise great year south. That’s why unplanned maintenance expenses are the worst expense on a building owner’s P&L.
Unplanned maintenance tends not just to impact the P&L, but it also distracts the team from their day-to-day operations, which pushes back other priorities. It starts to feel like all of these things happen at once, and before you know it, you feel like you’re playing from behind.
The worst part is when you don’t have control. You’ve done your research and planned your business, and you ought to have a way to prevent these unplanned disruptions.
Why Invest in Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance is the regular and routine maintenance of equipment and assets. The goal is to keep things running and prevent costly unplanned failures. You’re likely taking action on preventive maintenance – does your team have a checklist of what to do each day, each week, each month, and each year? That’s the basics of preventive maintenance. The challenge is that the equipment… and more so their maintenance requirements… can get complex. A ‘to-do’ list is a start, but it leaves a lot to be desired. Good preventive maintenance requires that the team knows what equipment is in the building, where it is, and when it was installed and last maintained. Often, maintenance teams need more information – warranties, blueprints, P&ID, and historic maintenance notes, to name a few.
It’s hard to fit all of this information on a to-do list. When it’s not located in a single place, the team tends to forget or miss steps. Great building owners who keep their unplanned maintenance costs low take the extra step in preventive maintenance.
How To Set Your Team Up For Preventive Maintenance Success
Great preventive maintenance isn’t hard. It just takes the right people, processes, and technology. At eFacility, we help building owners set their teams up to run a preventive maintenance program.
In a recent project, we helped the owner of a development and management firm that manages commercial, industrial, and residential properties. They needed a list of preventative maintenance requirements for all pieces of equipment in their building. We approached this challenge in three phases.
- Tagging the equipment
- Equipment was tagged with a self-adhesive, metal tag with a barcode
- Information tagged to the equipment included name, category, manufacturer, model number, serial number, installation date, description, floor, suite, and location details
- Placing the equipment in the CMMS, reviewing, and creating a list of maintenance tasks
- Reducing unplanned maintenance costs with preventative maintenance
- Once the equipment was tagged and maintenance activities created, we tied these activities to the equipment in the CMMS so the team had a complete picture and a single source of truth for maintenance
- Showing the locations of the equipment on building plans, which then simplified maintenance activities and shortened maintenance time
The First Step For Creating a Complete Preventive Maintenance Program In Your Facilities
At eFacility, we make preventive maintenance easy. The first step is contacting us. We’ll schedule a time to learn more about your operation and challenges and then put together a step-by-step plan to create a preventative maintenance process that saves you time and money.
About Us
eFacility provides software and services for facility managers who need to capture and share institutional knowledge.
eFacility’s patented technology allows technicians to access the documentation necessary to complete a work order from a mobile device.
Geo-based documentation delivery ensures the technician can quickly access the important documentation for only the area of the facility in which they’re standing.
