Facility maintenance is a critical aspect of operational efficiency. If you don’t think about your maintenance strategies, you lose a great deal of information about your business health as a whole. The condition of your building affects your day-to-day operations, your budget, and everything in between. Do, you must ask yourself, “Is my facility equipped to handle the demands of the company now and in the future?”
Conducting a Facility Condition Assessment will help you ascertain the health of your facility and develop strategies for short- and long-term improvement. You can begin by developing a Real Property Inventory, or a comprehensive list of your facility assets and their characteristics. This list should include the location, purchase date and age, and other qualifying characteristics of equipment to better categorize it and understand its role in your operations.
Once you’ve created a Real Property Inventory, you must audit equipment and determine the performance level based on its age and intended function. This auditing process will give you a sense of where you are achieving maximum operational efficiency, and areas that need improvement. Auditing your equipment piece by piece will help you better ascertain the condition of your facility using objective criteria.
After auditing, you can then:
- Predict the remaining lifespan of critical equipment. No piece of facility machinery will last forever. In order to not only budget for upgrades, but prevent critical breakdowns, you must be able to accurately predict the lifespan of critical applications. A Facility Condition Assessment can help you and your maintenance team to determine when equipment will start to pose performance and efficiency, and when it will have to be replaced before breakdowns start to occur.
- Budget for equipment upgrades. Upgrading your equipment should be a major part of the facility budget. Upgrading to newer technologies, while expensive in the short-term, can provide numerous long-term benefits to profits and sustainability. By using the information gathered from your equipment audits, you can budget year-by-year for upgrades and ancillary maintenance services.
- Strategize your preventative maintenance schedule. Facility equipment at the beginning of its life cycle needs drastically different maintenance services than equipment nearing the end. The Facility Condition Assessment will help you schedule preventatively maintenance services wisely, reducing unnecessary expenditure and better protecting your assets.
Facility Condition Assessments offer invaluable information for facility managers to better control the work environment. Talk to MaintenX today to learn about our preventative maintenance and auditing services.
