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) are 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 we affectionality call unplanned maintenance expenses the worst expense on a building owners P&L.
Unplanned maintenance tends not just impact the P&L, it distracts the team from their day to day 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, planned your business, and you ought to have a way to prevent these unplanned disruptions.
Why Invest in Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive mainteance is the regular and routine maintenance of equipment and assets. The goal is to keep things running and prevent costly unplanned failures and costs. It’s likely preventive you’re 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 maitenance. 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 mainteance requires that the team knows what equipment is in the building, where it’s at, and when it was installed and last mainteaned. Often, maintenance teams need even 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 in a single place the team tends to forget or miss steps. Great building owners that keep their unplanned maintenance cost low take the extra step in preventive mainteance.
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 team up to run a preventive maintenance program.
In a recent project we helped the owner of a development and management firm that leads commercial, industrial, and residential properties. They needed a list of preventative mainteance requirements for all pieces of equipment in their building. We approached this challenge in three phases.
- Tagging the equipment
- Equipmenet 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, review, and create a list of maintenance tasks
- Reducing unplanned maintenance costs with preventative maintenance
- One the equipment was tagged and maintenance activities created we tied these activities to the equiment in the CMMS so the team had a complete picture, and a single source of truth for maintenance
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 time to learn more about your operation and challenges, and then put together a step by step plan to create a preventiive maintenane process that saves you time and money.
About Us
eFacility provides software and services for facility managers that 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.
