Are you constantly spending money on fixing things?
Do you find you are constantly reacting to maintenance works and can’t keep up with the maintenance problems at your facility?
Here are some quick tips on how to get ahead of those fires and start managing your facilities with forward planning. It’s not hard, we promise! It just requires 10 minutes of your time per day, delegation, ownership and follow through.
As a building, maintenance and construction company with a large portfolio of clients we have worked with our clients to formulate a solid plan, that for one client with over 200 in their portfolio has saved them $1.4million in reactive works in ONE YEAR. We thought we would share a few hot tips on how this worked:
- Identify and track your maintenance spend – Identify what your current and past spend was on preventative and reactive works – these costs include the cost of your maintenance and cleaning staff if you have them.
- Create a reactive and a preventative works cost centre- if you don’t have these separated already, start now. Creating separate cost centres will help you with step one by tracking the inner workings of what is happening at your property. If you have multiple sites, separate cost centres will help identify what preventative works you should be scheduling ahead of time so you DON’T end up with large reactive works and you can plan maintenance cost in advance.
- Create and manage an asset register – For every item purchased you should have a register of what it is, location, manufacturer, model number, warranty period, service requirements and last service date, see our free spreadsheet. By doing this you will be able to feed into your maintenance forecast budget and schedule the correct contractor in advance. BONUS if you know its something you need regularly see if you can negotiate a set rate for it so you can forecast this cost and gain control of that maintenance budget. Read our blog on services that should be scheduled in and why.
4. Set up a maintenance programme with a reliable contractor – we often forget the value of a solid scheduled maintenance plan but this will help you regulate costs and with the right contractor minimise costs especially if you control multiple facilities.
5. Keep a calendar of your next services- this is handy so you can highlight each of these services due date for you AND for your facility staff so they are aware of when this happens. We have made this easier for you by creating an excel with all the scheduled services you may need, all you need to do is enter your last service date and as each facility works differently you may want to change the maintenance time frames as well.
