Innovative ways to reduce facility maintenance costs

Maintaining facilities and keeping them in good condition all year round requires several resources, including materials, equipment, and labour. Therefore, efficient facility maintenance can lead to high costs, and while you can't get away from these expenses, you may want to find ways to reduce them.

But reducing facility maintenance costs is no easy feat. Besides finding cost-effective ways to maintain facilities, your biggest challenge will be to find ways to do so without compromising efficiency and safety.

To simplify the process, we've identified several innovative ways to cut facility maintenance costs without reducing the efficiency of your maintenance processes and the safety of your buildings.

What is facility maintenance?

Facility maintenance includes all the processes required to maximise a facility's or commercial building's efficiency and utility. Facility maintenance aims to keep a building in working condition and provide tenants or workers with a safe, healthy environment.

It includes the upkeep of a facility's HVAC, electrical, plumbing and fire safety systems, sanitation and cleaning, and general maintenance to keep the interior and exterior of a building in good condition.

The benefits of facility maintenance

Facility maintenance offers several benefits for commercial property owners and tenants.

It increases the lifespan of a building's assets and the equipment required for maintenance. Improving the longevity of assets keeps them operating optimally and reduces the need for them to be replaced often, reducing your expenses.

Facility maintenance ensures that tenants and workers have everything they need to operate efficiently, improving daily operations. By providing a favourable work environment, you can keep employees working in the building satisfied and keep tenants happy by adding value to the property.

It also enhances the safety of facilities to reduce accidents in the workplace and keeps the building clean to minimise health risks that could cost your business. Keeping the building clean creates a healthy work environment, reducing health risks that could cost your business in more ways than one.

Finding smart ways to reduce maintenance costs

A crucial part of any facility maintenance manager's job is to achieve maximum efficiency and safety while finding ways to reduce maintenance costs. But it can be challenging to cut costs without cutting corners.

If you're under pressure to reduce maintenance costs, follow these smart tips to optimise your budget and keep maintenance costs low without compromising the efficiency and safety of your facilities.

Review life cycle costs

Whether it's an asset in your building or a piece of maintenance equipment, when an asset requires more maintenance than usual or constantly needs to be repaired, it may be time to replace it.

When deciding whether to repair or replace, consider the asset's life cycle costs. Life cycle costs are all the estimated costs associated with an asset, from when you acquired it until it's no longer helpful to your business and you need to get rid of it. Calculating the life cycle cost of an asset you want to replace will help you determine whether it's more cost-effective to replace or repair it.

Remember that the initial cost to replace an asset may be expensive, but in the long run, you may reduce maintenance costs by replacing rather than repairing.

Increase workforce efficiency with training

Creating a flexible workforce with multiple skills can increase efficiency and decrease facility maintenance costs.

Skilled workers are more likely to complete maintenance and repair tasks successfully the first time around, increasing your first-time fix rate. With a higher first-time fix rate, your team can take on more jobs and responsibilities, eliminating the need to outsource jobs and reducing your costs.

With adequate training, your technicians and maintenance staff can address problems before they become too complicated to fix, helping to decrease replacement costs in the long run. Excellent knowledge of facility maintenance may also help your workers identify issues and suggest innovative solutions that could prolong the lifespan of assets.

Training can also prevent accidents that could lead to occupational injuries and claims for compensation. When technicians understand and follow safety rules, it reduces the risk of accidents. It also ensures that all maintenance work is compliant, creating a safe environment free of incidents that could cause damage or deterioration that needs to be fixed in the future.

Stay one step ahead

Preventing issues can help you avoid more significant problems in the future, including costly repairs and replacements. Staying one step ahead of a crisis may require moving from reactive to preventative maintenance.

Reactive maintenance can be expensive, and it often demands additional labour or parts you haven't accounted for, requiring you to order extra materials or hire contract workers. And when you wait for something to go wrong, it may be too late to do repairs, and you'll have to replace assets.

Preventative maintenance lowers costs by increasing the lifespan of assets and reducing the need for regular repairs and replacements. The most efficient way to stick to a preventative maintenance plan is to schedule maintenance tasks with Facility Maintenance Software. The software makes it easy to implement a preventative maintenance schedule because you can:

• Automate job scheduling to ensure maintenance tasks are always assigned to your workers.
• Keep an online record of all maintenance work done.
• Create an inventory of all facility assets to keep track of them and remove and add items as you acquire and dispose of assets.
• Monitor the health of assets like equipment and machinery.

A cloud-based Facility Maintenance Software is advantageous as your maintenance workers can access the software at any location via their mobile devices. From here, they can view their daily maintenance tasks and log any jobs they do to keep an accurate record of all maintenance and repair activities.