3 Ways To Reduce Building Maintenance And Operations Costs

Building owners generally view maintenance as a sunk cost. Money is spent on urgent problems, and this becomes a costly endeavor as buildings age. As building operators, you have the power to leverage maintenance to maximize the value of your facilities and increase business revenues.

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f you keep your focus on building management and prioritize proactive maintenance tasks, building management can actually pay dividends by avoiding costly repairs. Use the three strategies below to optimize building management at your organization and reduce maintenance costs.

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(Photo provided by AkitaBox)

How To Reduce Building Maintenance Costs In Your Organization

1. Reduce Maintenance Request Response Time

Every time something goes wrong in your building, reduced reactive maintenance response time is an opportunity to showcase world class customer service. Delighting building occupants gives them a reason to promote your business. Promptly respond to maintenance requests and prioritize customer service. There are a variety of ways you can reduce maintenance request response times. The first is easy: switch from paper-based work order systems or spreadsheets to a facility management system. Next? Make sure you have up-to-date floor plans of each of your facilities so that each of your maintenance technicians know exactly where to go when responding to service requests instead of running back and forth between your shop and work order location.

building maintenance2. Automate Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance often takes a back seat to reactive problems because of priority. Ultimately though, we don’t get around to completing all of the maintenance projects for our buildings because of a lack of time and money. We spend large parts of our days entering data, responding to immediate tasks and looking for information instead of actually fixing problems. Lack of access to this information is the largest contributor to inefficiency in building management today, and this is what causes us to end up right back in that reactive maintenance cycle. By getting access to the building information you need and setting up preventive maintenance cycles in a facility management software, you’ll be one step ahead in your planning and you’ll be even one step closer to saving time and money, too.

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(Photo provided by AkitaBox)

3. Utilize A Facility Software For Onboarding

One of the biggest drains on the budget can be training and onboarding new facility and maintenance staff. It can be difficult to allocate extra staff to new employees to make sure they learn the ropes during their first few months on the job. 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. 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.

Need to get your preventive maintenance program in order before you dive into a Facility Management Software? Get a free guide to kickstarting a preventive maintenance plan.